CHAPTER 4 VERBS AND SITUATIONS
B. Situation type
5. Agents and Goal
The four situation types can be classified according to goal-directedness and whether or not there is, an instigator (termed an agent). An agent is the referent of an argument if the language encodes it as consciously responsible for what happens. Here the four situation types classified on presence of goals and agents.
a. States (-Goal) (-Agent) Axel owned a pair of jeans.
You sound hoarse.
Even small contributions count.
72 b. Activities (-Goal) (±Agent)
This machine embroiders. Agent Someone was listening.
He slept.
c. Achievements (+Goal) (-Agent) Axel received a pair of jeans.
I heard a bang.
She realized that 512 was eight cubed.
d. Accomplishments (+Goal) (±Agent) The river flooded the meadow.
The court heard all the evidence.
They planted the field with rye.
The hikers walked to Crianlarich.
The campers are packing up.
*Even small contributions carefully count,
*I carefully heard a bang,
The referent of an argument is an agent if the language encodes if as consciously responsible for what happens. Without naming it, the concept was introduced earlier in connection with negative clauses, which have agent subjects, and accusatives, which do not.
Accomplishments are like achievements in having a result, in being telic. Accomplishments differ from achievements in not having an instantaneous result. We can ask “How long does/ did it take Sandra to write a letter?” and we can say, for example, “It took George several minutes to cut the rope.”
To summarize:
States are non-dynamic, durative and atelic.
Activities are dynamic, durative and atelic.
Achievements are dynamic, instantaneous and telic.
Accomplishments are dynamic, durative and telic.
(Obviously, the terms ‘achievement’ and ‘accomplishment’ are used with a sense somewhat different from their everyday meanings.)
Activities and accomplishments are both dynamic and durative, and duration means the passage of a period. However, there is a
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difference: activities occur throughout a period, in English most commonly introduced by the preposition for.
a) 15 Lucy wrote for half an hour/all afternoon.
Accomplishments require expenditure of effort during a period leading to the result accomplished. The period is most often introduced by the preposition in
Lucy wrote a letter in half an hour
If a sentence tells of an unbounded activity, because the verb has either no object, as in sentence 15, or because the object is itself an unbounded noun phrase, as in 17, the activity takes place throughout a measurable duration. When the object of a verb is a definite referring expression (the letter, the letters) or a quantified referring expression (several letters, three letters, for example), the sentence is an accomplishment and we can express how long it takes this to be accomplished.
All telic events—achievements and accomplishments—are specific.
In the following paired sentences note how a specific event (in the
‘A’ sentences) can be changed to a non-specific activity (the ‘b’
sentences).
1. A Bert arrived at noon and left at 3 o’clock.
1. B People arrived and left throughout the afternoon.
2. A Tim watched a wrestling match.
2. B Tim watched wrestling matches.
3. A Sally baked bread last Saturday.
3. B Sally baked bread every Saturday.
The (a) sentences have a punctual interpretation and the (b) sentences have a distributed sense. The distributed sense may be due to a plural indefinite subject or object —that is, a noun phrase, which is unbounded—or to an adverbial phrase that expresses distribution, here by means of the proposition throughout or the specifier. But note that a plural subject or a
plural object does not necessarily express distribution of what the
predicate expresses:
a) People arrived at noon and left at three o’clock.
b) Tim enjoys wrestling matches.
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One final note about atelic and telic predicates: a verb that is atelic by itself may become telic with the addition of a particle.
A. Agents
Those two examples indicating that the subjects of states and achievements are not agents, which is why they have been given a minus for the feature agent. If such sentences are intransitive, like even small contributions count, then they are accusative. Activities and accomplishments are annotated ±for agency because some of them have agents but some do not: courts can carry out their functions carefully and someone can listen carefully, but some of the other sentences in the lower half of the table are semantically weird with carefully, for example
He carefully slept,
The river carefully flooded the meadow.
Although ±agent is not a very interesting characteristic of activities and accomplishments, the absence of agency from states and achievements does identify one feature of their meaning clearly.
B. Goals
Achievements and accomplishments are directed towards goals end- points after which the event is over: for instance, the event encoded in Axel received, a pair of jeans has been achieved the moment Axel has those jeans; the action of the meadow flooding has been accomplished when the meadow reaches a flooded state.
Among the tests, that Vendler (1967) put forward for distinguishing among situation types were time preposition phrases with in and for.
Acceptability with an in-time phrase, such as in twenty seconds or in four hours, diagnoses the presence of a goal. She realized in twenty seconds that 512 was eight cubed indicates that the flash formalization came twenty seconds after some point that is not actually specified in the achievement sentence – perhaps timing started when she was set an arithmetical puzzle. In addition, it is the same with achievement sentences generally: an in phrase specifies, from some prior point external to the encoded situation, how long it takes before the achievement happens.
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Tense and aspect
Problem 1: Simple present vs. present progressive
States vs. non-states
General rule (with exceptions seen below): the simple present is possible only with states; we need to use the present progressive for non-states.
A. I have a visitor now, could you please ring back.
B. I {am talking/*talk} to a visitor now, could you please ring back.
A. The food stinks/tastes well/is disgusting.
B. The food {is cooking/*cooks}.
A. I think Egbert is a good guitar player [think=hold an opinion]
B. I {am thinking/*think} about my work now. Please do not disturb me. [Think involves mental ‘activity’ here]
This is not just a rule about present tense. Other expressions referring to an exact point in time within an event also require progressive tenses.
A. I had/will have a visitor when the phone rang/rings.
B. *I talked/will talk to a visitor when the phone rang/rings. [Possible marginally in a reading irrelevant here where the phone is ringing was the reason why I talked to the visitor.]
A. I already knew that something bad was going to happen when I heard the shot.
B. I {was already running/*already ran} away when I heard the shot.
3.1.2 Explaining the general rule
• Explaining the connection between simple present and states:
a. Recall from sect. 2.2.1: states hold at any given point within the time in which they hold.
Events require a time interval longer than a moment to be identified.
b. The simple present perceives ‘now’ as a point in time and asserts that the situation named by the verb holds at that point.
c. Corollary to (a), (b): States are the only situation type compatible with simple present.
• Unlike the simple present, the progressive does not claim that the whole situation is happening at a point. It just says that the situation is in progress at a point in time. It thus ‘looks inside’ an event. It is thus an aspect, not a tense.
76 More on the progressive
The progressive has an effect similar to be in the process of:
(51) I am building a house = I am in the process of building a house Because the progressive picks out a point inside an event, it cannot easily be used with punctual events (which lack an internal temporal structure) unless the punctual VP is interpreted to express repetitions of punctual events (the iterative reading):
(52) The bomb was exploding; He was hitting the table.
Minor point: Generalizations about the progressive apply to the progressive participle even without be.
(53) [NP The man going to the station] was stopped before he got there.
(54) A. I saw someone drink the glass of beer. [He drank the glass of beer]
b. I saw someone drinking the glass of beer. [He may not finished drinking it]
3.1.3 An apparent exception to the general rule: The simple present with non-states
Section 3.1.1 said that states take simple present, events take progressive. There are cases where events take simple present, but it turns out that none of them refers to a presently happening event.
Generic present (habitual acts, situations that happen regularly).
A. Gwendoline drinks vodka.
B. Wayne runs twenty laps around the oval every day.
C. Smoking causes cancer.
Narrative present (historical present). A more vivid effect is achieved by pretending that what is being described is happening here and now.
a) I was walking down the street when this man stops me and asks me the way to the station. I tell him I do not know. Then he walks off.
b) Sport commentary: Becker volleys. Lendl dives; he reaches the ball, but hits it into the net.
c) Newspaper headlines: Bush resigns.
Speech act present. The verb describes what the current discourse/text is doing:
a) I hereby certify that all the details in this form are true.
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b) I declare the thirty-seventh Olympic Games open.
c) I now begin my analysis of the English progressive.
Present referring to future time (either with situations written in calendars, timetables, contracts, or in if or when clauses expressing a future/possible situation):
1) The train leaves at 3 o’clock. b. The meeting starts at 3.15.
c. Easter is in April this year. d. The new director starts work on 1 May.
2) When he retires, he wants to travel. b. If he comes to work drunk again, fire him.
A real exception to the general rule: The temporary reading with states The progressive is only usable with states if it characterizes the state as temporary:
a) Quentin is being nice to Marcela. [implies he isn't always nice]
b) Pedro is living in New York. [implies he won't always live there]
c) Ann is looking like Sinead O'Connor now, but she wants to let her hair grow back.
With position verbs, the progressive is necessary if the located entity is likely to change position.
1) Anthem house {stands/*is standing} on the corner. [houses don't move]
b. John is standing on the corner.
c. John stands on the corner every day, waiting for the bus.
2) The washing is hanging on the line.
b. The tree hangs over the edge of the cliff.
3) Mervyn is sitting on the floor.
2: The perfect
The present perfect is used when a past event is viewed from the present. The simple past is used when the situation is viewed from the past. There are two main reflections of this.
1. A phrase indicating time wholly in the past is compatible only with the simple past. A phrase indicating time including the present is compatible with the perfect.
1) The package {arrived/*has arrived} {two days ago/yesterday/on Monday}.
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b. The package {has arrived/*arrived} now.
2) He {hated/*has hated} rap music {until recently/once}.
b. He {has hated/*hated} rap music {until now/lately/since his youth}.
2. The perfect is preferred to the simple past when the event is somehow seen as relevant to the present. If there is no relevance, the simple past is used.
1) She is now a Democrat, but for a long time she {was/*has been} a Republican.
2) [job interview:] We need someone who understands Italian culture and speaks good Italian, so I will ask: {Have you been/*were you} in Italy?
a. Drugs {made/*have made} his life a misery, but after going to the clinic, he is no longer addicted and lives a happy and healthy life.
b. Drugs {made/have made} his life a misery, but although he is no longer addicted, the memory remains and he is determined never to touch them again.
A. J.S. Bach has lived in Leipzig [bad if talking about Bach, ok if talking about Leipzig]
b. Marie is a lawyer. She likes poetry and music. She lives in Frankfurt, but {she has lived/*she lived} in Leipzig
An analysis of the perfect
The present perfect asserts that a situation continues from the past into the present. This situation is either
(a) A state resulting from the situation named by the verb.
(b) The situation named by the verb itself (but only if there is a time expression indicating the continuation from past to present)
• Example for
a) I have received your letter now
Present perfect vs. simple present: Expressions expressing past-to- present time intervals are used with the perfect, not the simple present in English (unlike French, German). This seems to be because the English perfect (unlike that in French, German) explicitly describes a situation starting in the past and continuing into the present, so it is better suited to such contexts than the
Present.
a) She {has worked/*works} here for ten years now.
b) She {has owned/*owns} a car since 1979.
79 CONCLUSION
A verb is an essential a part of a sentence in English. All sentences are probably to include a verb. This indicates how essential verbs can be. Point out an event, an action, or a state with inside the sentence. More importantly, decide the means of the sentence. Meaning is an asset this is inspired with the aid of using the buildings wherein the verb appears. It describes a "situation"
that contains states, events, actions, etc. Vender (1967) classified the four-way situation classification based on the verb. The four-way classification is in circumstances, activities, results and achievements.
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