Event Structure and Non-Culminating Readings in Turkic

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.