Stephen Self AL5315-Semantics and Pragmatics 1st Reading Report March 7, 2012

SINGH, M. 1991. The Perfective Paradox or How to Eat Your Cake and Have it Too. Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 46979.

Hindi perfective verbs can express the termination of verbal action prior to the events natural endpoint or coterminous with it. They make this distinction using compound verbs (CV) to indicate complete accomplishment and simple verbs (SV) for what might be called the atelic perfective. 1 Singh dubs this atelic use of the simple perfective verb construction the perfective paradox. One of the principal causes of the paradox is the lack of articles, such that NPs can be construed as either quantized or cumulative. That is, apple can mean the apple or an apple, but also some mass of apple or any part of an apple. The interaction of this ambiguity with verbal aspect gives rise not only to the atelic perfective but also something Singh refers to as a partitive telic (471): a perfective predicate affecting only a part of each of several patients. To explain this notable interaction between nominal reference and aspectual marking, Singh invokes a lattice-theoretic analysis, where objects and events constitute elements in two separate lattices. Thematic relations can then be modeled as homomorphisms between objects and events that preserve the lattice structure (471). The paradoxical verbs in Hindi are all accomplishment verbs and have the property of graduality, such that parts of the affected patient can be mapped onto parts of the event resulting in the objects being affected incrementally as the event proceeds. Thus it is possible to have eaten (atelically) your cake and still have some left over or to finish eating (partitive perfect) five apples by biting into a fifth fruit, leaving significant amounts of all five unconsumed.

Compound verbs in this case are defined as constellations of verbs of the form [Verb1 + Verb2] (470) where Verb1 carries the semantic meaning and Verb2 the grammatical information.

2 Example sentences: 1. Mane aaj apnaa kek khayaa aur baakii kal khauugaa I-ERG today mine cake eat-PERF and remaining tomorrow eat-FUT I ate my cake today and I will eat the remaining tomorrow. 2. usne paanc seb khaaye he-ERG five apples eat-PERF He ate five apples (not entirely). 3. usne paanc seb khaa liye He-ERG five apples eat take-PERF He ate five apples (entirely).