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Semantics in Language Acquisition
Edited by Kristen Syrett and Sudha Arunachalam
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 24] 2018
► pp. 96–121

Chapter 5
On the acquisition of event culmination

| University of Groningen

There is quite a high rate of acceptance of telic-perfective predicates as descriptions of non-culminating events in children learning Germanic and Romance languages. What causes children, much more so than adults, to accept non-culminating interpretations of telic-perfective sentences? In this review, I discuss learners’ difficulties’ in each of three grammatical dimensions that contribute to event culmination: the notion of ‘result’ as encoded in the lexical semantics of verbs, telicity of verb phrases telicity, and perfectivity of tense-aspect morphology. I conclude that telicity and perfectivity do not cause the non-culmination acceptance patterns. Instead, the learnability challenge for event culmination lies in the acquisition of verb meanings. I sketch several new angles for further research, including the role of agentivity of the subject.

Keywords: verb meaning, telicity, aspect, perfectivity, event culmination, completion entailment, L1 acquisition, scalar semantics, pragmatic inferences
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The grammatical dimensions of event culmination
  • 3.Non-culmination patterns and the acquisition of the lexical meaning of verbs
  • 4.Non-culmination patterns and the acquisition of telicity
  • 5.Non-culmination patterns and the acquisition of perfectivity
  • 6.Conclusions and new developments in the acquisition of event culmination
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 2 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.24.05hou
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