Some universals of verb semantics

Most of the work on universals of human languages has been concentrated on the phonological, morphological, and syntactic properties of languages, with much less attention being devoted to the semantic side of language. The purpose of this chapter is to contribute to the investigation of universals in the realm of semantics, specifically Verb semantics. It will be argued that there is a fundamental set of distinctions which inform the Verb systems of all languages, and a system of semantic representation will be proposed to capture these distinctions. The discussion will proceed as follows. In Section 2, the set of distinctions will be introduced and justified, and in Section 3, a formal system of semantic representation to capture them will be proposed. In Section 4, evidence of the widespread validity of these distinctions will be put forward, and in Section 5, conclusions will be presented. Aktionsart and the organization of verbal semantics The fundamental insight comes from Vendler (1967), who proposed a classification of Verbs into states, achievements, accomplishments, and activities. Examples of English Verbs from each of the Aktionsart classes are given in (1) (1) a. States: be sick, be tall, be dead, love, know, believepop, explode, shatter (the intransitive versions) c. Accomplishments: Melt, freeze, dry (the intransitive versions); learn d. Activities: March, walk, roll(the intransitive versions); swim, think, snow, write States depict static situations which are inherently temporally unbounded (atelic), and both achievements and accomplishments express changes of state, which are inherently temporally bounded (telic), or they express onsets of actions (not found in English but see Section 4 below): achievements are punctual, while accomplishments are not.