Abstract
The distinction between telic and atelic predicates has been described in terms of the algebraic properties of their meaning since the early days of model-theoretic semantics. This perspective was inspired by Aristotle’s discussion of types of actions that do or do not take time to be completed which was taken up and turned into a linguistic discussion of action-denoting predicates by Vendler (1957). The algebraic notion that seemed to be most conducive to express the Aristotelian distinction appeared to be the mereological notion of a part, applied to the time at which these predicates hold: atelic predicates, like push a cart, have the subinterval property, that is, whenever they are true at a time interval, then they are true at any part of that interval; this does not hold for telic predicates, like eat an apple, cf. Bennett & Partee (1972), Taylor (1977), and Dowty (1979)2. Bach (1986) integrated these insights into a semantics based on events.
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Krifka, M. (1998). The Origins of Telicity. In: Rothstein, S. (eds) Events and Grammar. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 70. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3969-4_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3969-4_9
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