opening
The category of achievements forms one of the four cornerstones of Vendler's (1967) aspectual classification, among accomplishments, activities, and states. Examples of achievement verbs are given in (1) [arrive, be born, begin, convince, depart, die, discover, find, forget, hear, …]. A long-standing intuition about achievements is that they denote instantaneous events. In Vendler's words, achievements occur at a single moment (p. 103) and involve unique and definite time instants (p. 107). Similarly, Freed (1979, p. 51) states that [a]n achievement essentially names an event that has no duration. Putting the same point in yet another way, Mourelatos (1981, p. 192) writes that achievements can be indefinitely placed within a temporal stretch, but they cannot in themselves occur over or throughout a temporal stretch.
reference
there are two versions of the paper. the published version (pinon_aes.[pdf,ps.gz]) has the following reference:
- Piñón, Christopher. 1997. Achievements in an event
semantics. Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory
VII, Aaron Lawson and Eun Cho (eds.),
pp. 273–296. Ithaca, NY: CLC Publications, Cornell
University.
URL <http://pinon.sdf-eu.org/covers/aes.html>
the unpublished version (pinon_aes_long.[pdf,ps.gz]) is somewhat longer and properly contains the published version. its reference is:
- Piñón, Christopher. 1997. Achievements in an event
semantics. Unpublished manuscript, Universität Düsseldorf,
September 1997.
URL <http://pinon.sdf-eu.org/covers/aes.html>
download "Achievements in an event semantics"
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the unpublished version:
- 270K (PDF file)
- 472K (PS file compressed with gzip)
