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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 oran apple, but alsosome mass of apple orany 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 partof 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.

1 Compound verbs in this case are defined as constellations of verbs of the form [Verb1 + Verb2] (470) whereVerb1 carries the semantic meaning and Verb2 the grammatical information.

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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).