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Since the seminal work by David Dowty, much inspired by the earlier ideas of Generative Semantics, a number of proposals have been developed accounting for the internal constitution and interpretation of accomplishment event predicates like 'open the door' or 'break the window'. Current theories of accomplishment event structure vary along a number of dimensions, including the subevental makeup of accomplishments and semantic relations connecting components of a complex eventuality description. The goal of this paper is twofold. First, I take into account evidence from non-culminating readings of accomplishment predicates in Turkic languages and argue that this evidence supports the following generalizations about the structure and interpretation of accomplishments: (i) the activity subevent is to be represented independently from the change of state; (ii) different accomplishment predicates constrain the relation between subevents in different ways; (iii) accomplishments differ as to the internal constitution of the activity subevent. Second, I will suggest that restrictions on non-culminating readings observed with different types of accomplishments support a specific view of how non-culminating accomplishments are derived. I will propose that at least in languages like Turkic, a necessary condition for non-culminating predicates is as follows: the activity component of a complex eventuality description has to have temporal parts that make no substantial contribution into bringing the culmination about. What I will say about Turkic does not presuppose that all non-culmination phenomena cross-linguistically warrant a uniform analysis. Even though the Turkic pattern shows strict semantic parallelism in other languages, it is not unlikely that there is more than one way in which non-culminating accomplishments can be derived. But whether a variety of other cases discussed in the literature reduce to the same pattern is a separate empirical question I am not trying to answer. The paper is organized as follows. In Section one, I introduce relevant material from three Turkic languages, Karachay–Balkar, Chuvash, and Tuba Altai, and observe that accomplishments in these languages fall into three types. Some yield the failed attempt interpretation, others the partial success interpretation, yet others do not license non-culminating readings at all. Section two argues for a decompositional analysis of the accomplishment event structure, whereby activity and change of state subevents are kept representationally distinct. Two types of relations between these components of the accomplishment structure are identified; the failed attempt and partial success readings are reduced to the properties of these relations. Section three approaches the problem of why non-culminating interpretations are available for some but not for all accomplishments. It reviews a recent theory suggesting that the (un)availability of non-culminating readings is accounted for by the unique temporal arrangement of contextually salient subevents of the activity component, either lexically or contextually entailed. The concluding subsection of Section three presents a number of problematic cases for this view. Section four outlines an alternative to the unique temporal arrangement. It argues that non-culminating accomplishments describe a proper non-final part e of the activity component of an event description such that the distance to the culmination between the initial and final bounds of e is insignificant in the current context. This approach makes more accurate predictions about the attested distribution of non-culminating interpretations and successfully avoids the complications associated with the unique temporal arrangement hypothesis. After making the notion of distance to the culmination more formally explicit, in the concluding section I address a few related issues concerning the eventuality type of non-culminating accomplishments and their interaction with aspectual operators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the seminal work by David Dowty, much inspired by the earlier ideas of Generative Semantics, a number of proposals have been developed accounting for the internal constitution and interpretation of accomplishment event predicates like ‘open the door’ or ‘break the window’. Current theories of accomplishment event structure vary along a number of dimensions, including the subevental makeup of accomplishments and semantic relations connecting components of a complex eventuality description. The goal of this paper is twofold. First, I take into account evidence from non-culminating readings of accomplishment predicates in Turkic languages and argue that this evidence supports the following generalizations about the structure and interpretation of accomplishments: (i) the activity subevent is to be represented independently from the change of state; (ii) different accomplishment predicates constrain the relation between subevents in different ways; (iii) accomplishments differ as to the internal constitution of the activity subevent. Second, I will suggest that restrictions on non-culminating readings observed with different types of accomplishments support a specific view of how non-culminating accomplishments are derived. I will propose that at least in languages like Turkic, a necessary condition for non-culminating predicates is as follows: the activity component of a complex eventuality description has to have temporal parts that make no substantial contribution into bringing the culmination about. What I will say about Turkic does not presuppose that all non-culmination phenomena cross-linguistically warrant a uniform analysis. Even though the Turkic pattern shows strict semantic parallelism in other languages, it is not unlikely that there is more than one way in which non-culminating accomplishments can be derived. But whether a variety of other cases discussed in the literature reduce to the same pattern is a separate empirical question I am not trying to answer. The paper is organized as follows. In Section one, I introduce relevant material from three Turkic languages, Karachay–Balkar, Chuvash, and Tuba Altai, and observe that accomplishments in these languages fall into three types. Some yield the failed attempt interpretation, others the partial success interpretation, yet others do not license non-culminating readings at all. Section two argues for a decompositional analysis of the accomplishment event structure, whereby activity and change of state subevents are kept representationally distinct. Two types of relations between these components of the accomplishment structure are identified; the failed attempt and partial success readings are reduced to the properties of these relations. Section three approaches the problem of why non-culminating interpretations are available for some but not for all accomplishments. It reviews a recent theory suggesting that the (un)availability of non-culminating readings is accounted for by the unique temporal arrangement of contextually salient subevents of the activity component, either lexically or contextually entailed. The concluding subsection of Section three presents a number of problematic cases for this view. Section four outlines an alternative to the unique temporal arrangement. It argues that non-culminating accomplishments describe a proper non-final part e of the activity component of an event description such that the distance to the culmination between the initial and final bounds of e is insignificant in the current context. This approach makes more accurate predictions about the attested distribution of non-culminating interpretations and successfully avoids the complications associated with the unique temporal arrangement hypothesis. After making the notion of distance to the culmination more formally explicit, in the concluding section I address a few related issues concerning the eventuality type of non-culminating accomplishments and their interaction with aspectual operators.

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This paper introduces a new proposal by Copley and Harley (2014, 2015) to overcome the ‘Imperfective Paradox’ by relying on the notion of dynamic ‘forces’ by Talmy (2000). They treat dynamic predicates as predicates of forces, represented by functions from an initial situation to a final situation that occurs ceteris paribus, that is, if other conditions are equal or if nothing external intervenes. Thus, they eliminate causative entailments, avoiding the Paradox, and explain the frustratives as well. However, we view the Progressive aspect as incremental progress based on the planned/scheduled culminating accomplishment. Another important phenomenon is that there occurs an ambiguity between progressive and resultative, as in Korean and Japanese wearing verbs. A caused existence of the accomplishment Theme is not entailed by the perfective but its plan still affects our grammar of language and cognition. Imperfective and perfective, appearing as the same in some languages, require a new syntax-semantics interface analysis, and conative and frame idea, to solve the paradox. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The lacking Russian progress in war in Ukraine is often attributed to failing logistics, yet the logistics and its eventually failure is not explained. The purpose with this paper is to present some logistics principles that can be used to describe the Russian way of logistics planning, and to infer whether failing logistics slowed down the military operations or if failing operational conduct led to revised operational plans that could not be sustained logistically. The initial Russian Course of Action (COA) to take Kyiv was probably well supported logistically. When the COA failed, contingency plans most likely did not take into consideration the logistical challenges of supporting another type of operation, partly because of the logistics vacuum resulting from the preceding exercises. In the southeast the logistical concept seems to build on the echelon principle, which fits poorly with the lack of operational success. Adding to this is successful Ukrainian tactics of targeting Russian logistics resources which significantly reduces the Russian fighting power. This assessment is based on openly accessible information about the Russian campaign. Reporting from an ongoing war poses challenges of verifying data. Both warring parties and other stakeholders pursue their own interest through strategic communication. Yet, by combining different sources we believe that our findings are quite robust. For future research, archival studies both in Ukraine and Russia, combined with interviews with logistics personnel at both sides would add new dimensions to the research. We realise though that such data sources will not be accessible for quite some time.