piñón: weak and strong accomplishments

abstract

I argue for a distinction among accomplishments between what I call weak accomplishments and strong accomplishments. This distinction is based on an empirical argument from Hungarian that two traditional tests for accomplishments do not diagnose one and the same class of linguistic expressions. I propose that the essential difference between weak and strong accomplishments is that the latter are presuppositional in a way that the former are not and capture this difference by means of a notion of finishing that figures in the analysis of strong accomplishments but not in that of weak accomplishments. In Hungarian, weak accomplishments form a subclass of the class of definiteness effect verbs (excluding achievements) discussed in chapter 4.

note

I have another (loosely related) paper, "Definiteness effect verbs", in the same volume.

reference

download "Weak and strong accomplishments"

There are two versions available. The first is the final version that I formatted, dating from 26 Jan. 2006: The second is the pre-final proof of the paper, formatted by a typesetter in India, dating from 8 May 2006: The two versions are essentially the same as far as the text is concerned. The formatting of the proof is very different from the formatting of my version—this is thanks to Springer for having given us an irrelevant style sheet to follow. The other matter is typos: the typesetter introduced a huge number of typos (no exaggeration) in the first proof (that weren't present in my version), which I had to painstakingly correct in an email message (no fun). Happily, these are corrected in the pre-final proof, which very closely approximates the published version.

By the way, here is the pre-final proof of the references for the whole volume, dating from 9 March 2006 (the references aren't included in the pre-final proof of the paper):

go to my cover page for papers
piñón: weak and strong accomplishments
last updated on 8 aug 07
christopher piñón (pinon AT sdf HYPHEN eu DOT org)

http://pinon.sdf-eu.org/covers/wsa.html