On the (a)telicity property of English verb phrases

Abstract

The aim of the paper is that of offering an overview of various executions of the aspectual notions of (a)telicity in the current literature. The core idea is that in English the telic-atelic contrast is compositionally computed at the level of VP or IP. We discuss (a)telicity of complete VPs in the analyses put forward by Krifka (1989, 1992, 1998), Rothstein (2008), Filip (2008), and Landman and Rothstein (2008).

Keywords

• (a)telic predicates
• quantization
• cumulativity
• event maximalization
• incremental homogeneity