Achievements vs. Accomplishments : A Computational Treatment of Atomicity, Incrementality, and Perhaps of Event Structure

Achievements and accomplishments are argued in this paper to differ w.r.t. atomicity (rather than punctuality), a notion strongly but not exclusively related to incrementality, i.e., to eventobject mapping functions ; the latter will be shown to be unsufficient to account for certain cases of non-atomicity. A computational treatment of incrementality and atomicity will be presented, and a number of related empirical problems considered, notably lexical polysemy in verb – argument relationships. Finally, the approach will be shown to be extendable to the notion of telicity, opening the way to a broader treatment of event structure.