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Article published In:
Studies in Language
Vol. 43:4 (2019) ► pp.850–895

The grammar of ‘non-realization’

| Heinrich-Heine-Universität Dusseldorf
| University College London
| Goldsmiths, University of London
| Simon Fraser University

On the basis of cross-linguistic data from both genetically and geographically related and unrelated languages, in this article we argue that the linguistic phenomena usually referred to as the avertive, the frustrative and the apprehensional belong not to three but to five – semantically related, and yet distinct grammatical categories, all of which involve different degrees of non-realization of the verb situation in the area of Tense-Aspect-Mood: apprehensional, avertive, frustrated initiation, frustrated completion, inconsequential. Our major goal here is to account for these grammatical categories in terms of an adequate model of linguistic categorization. For this purpose, we apply the notion of Intersective Gradience (introduced for the first time in the morphosyntactic domain in Aarts (2004, 2007) to the morphosemantic domain. Thus the present approach reconciles two major approaches to linguistic categorization: (i) the classical, Aristotelian approach and (ii) a more recent, gradience/fuzziness approach.

Keywords: apprehensional, avertive, frustrated initiation, frustrated completion, inconsequential, linguistic categorization, semantically elaborate grammatical categories
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Semantically elaborate grammatical categories
  • 3.Tense-Aspect-Mood semantically elaborate categories in the “grammar of non-realization”
    • 3.1Apprehensional
    • 3.2Avertive
    • 3.3Frustrated initiation
    • 3.4Frustrated completion
    • 3.5Inconsequential
  • 4.Linguistic categorization
    • 4.1Grammatical polysemies and abstract semantic prototypes/semantic “cores”
    • 4.2The present approach: Intersective Gradience and semantically elaborate categories
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 23 January 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.18044.kut
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