An important question in inner aspect research is how it is best to represent the delimited nature of event descriptions. While delimitedness or telicity is considered in many analyses to be a purely semantic phenomenon, we have also seen in recent decades several proposals about how telicity is syntactically instantiated. In this course we will survey some of these analyses from the past 70 years or so by comparing and contrasting their central claims and predictions. For example, after a brief introduction to Vendler’s (1957) aspectual classification of verbal predicates, we will discuss semantic proposals such as Verkuyl (1972, 1993) and Krifka (1989, 1992, 1998), who are both fundamentally interested in how the direct object interacts with the verb to determine aspectual interpretations. Krifka uses the semantic properties of quantization and cumulativity to capture the relationship between the referential properties of the direct object and the (a)telicity of verbal predicates. This analysis is challenged in much later work including Kratzer’s (2004) syntactic analysis motivated by the connection between the availability of (a)telic interpretations and case assignment with respect to the direct object.

Another topic that has been the topic of much debate concerns the relationship between result states and telicity: Decomposition analyses like Dowty (1979) directly link telicity to the presence of a caused result state in the lexical semantics of verbal expressions. This is in contrast with the more recent analysis of Borer (2005), who explicitly argues against this idea and proposes instead that telic structures are quantity structures, which come about by range assignment under specifier-head agreement. On this analysis, result states are only a “side effect” of quantity events and the notion of quantity, defined as the absence of homogeneity, is offered as an alternative to Krifka’s quantization property.

In this course we will discuss these and other similarly contentious issues from a cross-linguistic perspective, often using data from Germanic and Slavic languages as well as Hungarian to test theoretical claims.

Level: advanced