Change of Location and Change of State: How Telicity is Attained

Change of Location and Change of State: How Telicity is Attained Chungmin Lee Department of Linguistics, Seoul National University Seoul 151-742, Korea clee@snu.ac.kr Abstract. This paper basically discusses parallels between change of location (or space) and change of state. Change of state is analogous to change of location, involving an abstract state Source and an abstract state Goal with abstract Path, involving telicity and showing alternations crosslinguistically. Spatial change is least abstract, whereas temporal change and state change are more abstract and psychological change is most abstract, exhibiting various phenomena of degree modification and telicity differentiations. Abstraction causes argument reduction and change in syntactic behavior. State-oriented predicates are modified by the equivalents of the degree modifier very and process-oriented ones by the quality modifier well and its equivalents. Keywords: change of location, change of state, creation/removal, telicity, degree, Generative Lexicon Theory 1. Introduction1 This paper discusses parallels between change of location and change of state, involved in locomotive (=motion), change of state, and creation/removal verbs, trying to see how telicity is attained semantically, examining cross-linguistic typological variation in lexical patterning and some syntactic behaviors. First, spatial uses of prepositions or postpositions are closely connected with temporal uses of them, although the latter are more abstract and limited because of directionality and dimensionality. Second, change of state (qualities) is structurally associated with change of location, with its Source and Goal. Change always means a shift from ¬P to P in state as well as in location through the flow of time. But the former is more abstract. Third, when change of state becomes psychological, it becomes even more abstract. As seen in build tension or its Korean equivalent kincangkam-ul coseng-ha-ta, indirect constitutive causation changes to experienced (direct) causation and does not need any part of the object such as ‘material’ (from a default argument). This is ‘derived unaccusativity’ (Pustejovsky 1995) that allows for modification by the degree adverbial maywu ‘very’ in Korean. If Mary’s presence is building tension then Mary’s presence has built tension. In other words, imperfective paradox disappears because there is no telicity involved any more. 1We benefited from our three-year project on Semantic Structures of Predicates in Korean (from 1997 to 2000 with B.Kang and S. Nam), which basically adopted the Generative Lexicon Theory (Pustejovsky 1995) approach. We also thank Taro Kageyama for inviting me to his workshop at LP2002 (Meikai University). This research was supported by the KRF-2009-342A00017 (Excellent Scholar) grant. Copyright 2010 by Chungmin Lee PACLIC 24 Proceedings 885 2. Motion Expressions with Goal/Theme 2.1 Typological Variation of Motion Expressions Typologically, in verb-framed languages (Talmy 2000) such as K/J, Hindi, Romance, Semitics, Bantu and Polynesian languages, an existential/stative location postposition/preposition such as –ey (K), -ni (J), à (French), -meN (Hindi) is further used only for basic directed motion verbs but not for manner verbs, e.g. (1) a. hakkyo-ey iss-ess-ta school-LOC be - PAST-DEC ‘(She) was in the school.’ b. hakkyo-ey ka-ass-ta2 (2) * hakkyo-ey(K)/gakko-ni(J) talli –ess-ta school –PATH/GOAL go-PAST-DEC ‘(She) went to (the) school.’ school -PATH/GOAL …

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