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Aspectual coercion and the typology of change of state predicates

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 February 2007

ANDREW KOONTZ-GARBODEN
ANDREW KOONTZ-GARBODEN
Affiliation:
Stanford University
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Abstract

The point of departure of this paper is the consideration of how words with the meanings of property concept states (states that are lexicalized as adjectives in languages that have that lexical category, cf. Dixon 1982), e.g. ‘red’, are related to words denoting their corresponding change of state, e.g. ‘redden’. It is shown that while many languages relate words with these meanings to one another via some morpholexical process, this is not so in the Polynesian language Tongan. A detailed case study shows that in this language there are no non-causative change of state lexemes based on property concepts. Rather, these meanings are derived pragmatically from verbs denoting the corresponding state via aspectual coercion (Moens & Steedman 1988, Jackendoff 1997, de Swart 1998, Zucchi 1998, Michaelis 2004). This finding is shown to have consequences for the understanding of the typology of change of state predicates (Koontz-Garboden 2005, 2006, Koontz-Garboden & Levin 2005) and for theories of event structure: (a) the typological space is broader than previously thought and (b) theories of event structure need to be reconsidered in order to account for the postlexical derivation of meaning.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , March 2007 , pp. 115 - 152
Copyright
2007 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I am grateful to the following people for comments and data related to this work: Doug Ball, John Beavers, Elena Benedicto, Lev Blumenfeld, Melissa Bowerman, Joan Bresnan, Luis Casillas Martinez, Eve Clark, Mike Dukes, Hana Filip, Ivan García-Álvarez, Martin Haspelmath, Shelly Lieber, Jimmy Lin, Yuko Otsuka, Sergei Tatevosov, and Judith Tonhauser. Paul Kiparsky and Beth Levin have seen this work through all of its stages and have provided crucial feedback at each of them, for which I am grateful. Martina Faller, Itamar Francez, and Ashwini Deo provided particularly helpful feedback at critical stages, as did two anonymous JL reviewers. Data from Tongan, unless another source is given, are drawn from fieldwork carried out in 2003–2004 in East Palo Alto, CA, with Sisilia Lutui, a marvelous consultant, for whose patience and wisdom I am especially grateful. People interested in the data for phonological reasons should be warned that I have not marked vowel length or the definitive accent consistently in the examples. This research was supported in part by NSF Grant BCS-0004437 (Beth Levin, P.I.) and by Graduate Research Funds from the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University.