Generative Lexicon Approach to Derived Inchoative Verbs in Korean

Since Vendler (1967), the event structure and the verbal aspect have been one of the controversial issues in verbal semantics. These issues result from the fact that all the verbs, which belong to each aspectual class, do not behave in the same way within each class. Among four aspectual classes suggested by Vendler (1967), achievement verbs show various behaviors and the subclasses of achievement verbs can be classified according to several patterns based on the similarity and difference between the various behaviors of achievement verbs. As some semanticists have suggested, some of them are called degree achievement. In particular, we can observe the pattern of the change, which the verbal events show, because achievement and accomplishment events involve the changing event and their core events are also changes. According to Smith (1999), telicity is the important property for characterizing achievement and accomplishment situations and differentiating them from state and activity situations. A telic event implicates the heterogeneity and the complex event. This indicates that a telic event should denote the changing event. Therefore, exploiting the verbal semantics in terms of the changing event is one way of solving the long-discussed but unsolved problems related to Vendler’s aspectual classes in Lexical Semantics.