Non-neutrality and setting of standards in degree of change and motion events

Abstract

A variety of aspects have been the target of discussion in linguistic literature. Degree achievement verbs are 'murky' in that they cannot be classified as an appropriate type from the perspective of telicity. Japanese DAs are derived from adjectives with a derivational morpheme, receiving only a telic interpretation. Since their telicy can be uniformly determined, it is expected that they require a different analysis from English degree achievement verbs. On scrutiny, however, Japanese degree achievement verbs show several phenomena that can be captured by hypothesizing the ontology of degree that is applied to the analysis of degree achievement verbs in English. The goal of this paper is, then, to show that a comprehensive analysis of Japanese degree achievement verbs can be provided based on a scalar semantics by hypothesizing standard's setting.

Keywords

• degree achievements
• scale
• motion events