Talk:Telicity
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[edit] Telicity vs. aspect
Telicity is not a verb aspect. The reading of the notion of telicity, as described in the article, is somewhat strange for me. First of all, it does not seem to be (as described) a feature of a verb at all. Particularly, one cannot say that it is any aspect of a verb. Instead, it is marked on the object, not on the verb. So, it is a syntactical feature of a sentence, not a morphologic feature of a verb. I am very surprised because it looks like if someone undereducated had changed the meaning of the well-defined idea of telicity (as used in, for example, English and Polish).
The telic - atelic difference has in fact virtually nothing to do with aspect. One cannot also say that the Slavic prefix pre- (Polish prze-) is the telicity marker, and the statement that pre- is perfective, is also false. In fact, verbs with prefixes (including pre-) can be either imperfective and perfective, see verb aspect.
Telicity is a verb feature but not an aspect. Instead of the reading presented here, it is understood as having the aim included in the meaning of the verb. It has nothing to do with whether the aim was achieved or not. Instead, verbs denoted a completed action are termed perfective, not telic.
The telic - atelic division is present in English. As a rule, a given verb can be either telic or atelic. All state verbs (dream, love, believe, understand) are atelic, some action verbs are atelic as well (sing, walk, talk). Many action verbs are telic however (write, come, buy) - they all have an aim incorporated in their meaning.
Note that state verbs are not used, as a rule, in the Progressive aka Continuous Aspect (I am loving you now - ?). Similar restrictions can be observed for telic - atelic verbs. Namely, the Past Simple of telic verbs means they are viewed as completed while the Past Simple of atelic verbs means they are not vieved as completed: John wrote that article in 1950 (telic action) means a complete action but he worked there in 1950 (atelic action) does not mean a complete action and the same about he believed in democracy in his youth (atelic state).
To express the incompleteness of a past telic action, one must use the Continuous Aspect: John was writing an article in 1950 (we do not know if he finished or not). This sentence has a sharply different meaning that John wrote an article in 1950. In contrary, the sentences like I worked there in 1950 and I was working there in 1950 (an atelic verb) have the same or very similar meaning (even if the latter suggests an additional duration of the action).
A similar phenomenon can be observed in Perfect and Perfect Continuous Aspects: I have worked and I have been working (atelic) have very similar meanings while I have written and I have been writing (telic) differ (the latter does not seem to denote a completed action). And similarly, none of the two sentences I have lived here since 1960 and I have been living here since 1960 (atelic state) imply the end of the state.
And yet another example. I had been writing a book before I went abroad (both telic) needs the Perfect Continuous Aspect in first part. But a similar I had been working in Boston before I went abroad (the first verb is atelic action) can be replaced with I had worked in Boston before I went abroad.
The telic - atelic difference (as described here by me and not as described in the article) works in Slavic languages as well. The difference manifests itself on the morphologic level: there are differences in imperfective - perfective pairs between telic and atelic verbs.
There are papers on missunderstandings of the notion of telicity (and in particular, on mixing telicity with perfective aspect, just like in this article). They can possible be found on the Net. The source of most of the English examples above (changed partially by me) is An Introductory English-Polish Contrastive Grammar by J. Fisiak, M. Lipińska-Grzegorek and T. Zabrocki, PWN, Warszawa 1978.
-- Grzegorj 11:45, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
- How about assuming the problem "using the same term across unrelated languages"? The difference between verb and "non-verb" aspect is a difference in marking. In Finnish, this marking is on the object, since that is what determines whether the action is successful or not. Furthermore, the perfective aspect opposition is lexical in Finnish, but the telicity is grammatical, which is different from English. When talking about specific verbs, consider the fact that verbs of emotion (dream, love, believe, understand) are partitive verbs, i.e. always atelic in Finnish, which mirrors the English case, and shows that it is the same thing. But, the action verbs (sing, walk, talk, write, come, buy) are not necessarily of either telicity, since if the object is not finished, they must be marked atelic. For example, Kävelen maratonia "I am walking a marathon". In these cases, the contrast resembles the perfectivity contrast, but is not "confused" with it as you accuse. --Vuo 13:39, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
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- I see virtually no reason for changing the original meaning of the term "telicity", and of course I'd like using the same term as widely as possible. In English telic / atelic is a verbal feature, that is a verb cannot be, as a rule, telic in one sentences, and atelic in others. The notion was introduced as early as in '50 in the meaning I described (and cited into the article). As far as I know, some scholars in their works on Slavic and Finnic aspect (like Filip), just changed the meaning of the term (for unknown reason) in order to find similarities between Germanic, Slavic and Finnic aspects. Which is more, they have been criticized lately as their argumentation was simply wrong, incorrect, inconsistant with facts, at least for Slavic. See Aspectual Pairing in Polish by Młynarczyk for more details (available here). Grzegorj 17:56, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
- The OED Online's first definition for telic is "Gram. Of a conjunction or clause: Expressing end or purpose." Its first citation for this definition is from Joseph Emerson Worcester's 1846 Universal and Critical Dictionary of the English Language. So, it's not accurate to say that Howard Garey introduced the term, and it's possible that the term's different applications to verbs were developed independently, rather than by one group's misunderstanding of another. (Granted, Garey's use seems closer to the OED's definition, but still.) Ruakh 06:35, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Irregular Finnish verbs
I must dispute the claim that tuntea and nähdä are simply irregular. First, the verb tuntea is simply not irregular. It may take either telicity: Tunnen hänet niin hyvin means "I know him so completely well", but Tunnen häntä niin hyvin refers to "I know something relevant about his character" (implying "I don't say I know him completely"). This nuance is splitting hairs, but it's still a valid contrast. Second, the verb nähdä is actually irregular, but it's not just this simple. The telicity contrast acts as case government for distinguishing different verbs, much like distinguishing "look" from "look out". I am yet to see an actually irregular telicity — which is not case government — and I doubt its existence can be shown in a scientifically rigorious manner, because I think the claims necessary for proving this are not falsifiable. --Vuo 19:17, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
- I can't fully agree with this. First, consider tuntea: while it is possible to introduce a telicity contrast to this verb in certain contexts, this does not remove the fact that it shows in its basic use irregular object marking. In a prototypical construction like tunnen Liisan it takes an accusative object despite the fact that the sentence is irresultative. There is no difference of resultativity between, say, rakastan Liisaa (regular marking) and tunnen Liisan (irregular marking); no result is involved in either case. As a further analogy: rakastaa can also be described as a (prototypically) irresultative verb just as tuntea regardless of the fact that it is possible to introduce a contrast in limited contexts (rakastan hänet kuoliaaksi and the like). Then as far as nähdä is concerned, it remains irregular (as you admit) even though it is true that the marking serves another function in this case.
- As for methods for identifying irregular telicity, contrasting with other Finnic languages provides an interesting perspective. In Estonian tundma behaves differently from Finnish tuntea, taking a partitive object (ma tunnen teda, etc.). One of these must be semantically irregular, because they can't be both regular. --AAikio 22:14, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
