Telicity, Atomicity and the Vendler Classification of Verbs

This paper develops the idea that the telicity is derived from atomicity. An atomic predicate is a singular predicate denoting a set of individuals which count as one individual on some scale of measurement, i.e. must be formally of the form λa.P(a) ∧ MEAS(a) = <1,U>. Atomic sets of this kind are derived via a maximalisation operation (Filip and Rothstein 2005, Rothstein 2007b). While in the nominal domain, there is a distinction between count predicates which denote sets of atoms and mass predicates which do not, the set of verbs contains only count predicates, i.e. basic verbal denotations at the V and VP level are of the form λe. P(e) ∧ MEAS(e) = <1,U>. However, there is a division between those verbal predicates for which a value for U is specified and those for which it is not. The former are telic and the latter are not. We see that the different Vendler classes contribute to determining the telicity of the VPs they head in different ways, depending on their inherent properties. We show that only atomic (i.e. singular) predicates are telic, and thus plural (distributive) predicates are necessarily atelic.