Revisiting the distinction between accomplishments and achievements

As is well known, Vendler (1957) proposed to distinguish between two classes of telic predicates, namely, accomplishments (eat an apple, draw a circle), denoting durative events, and achievements (reach the summit, win the race), denoting punctual ones. As Kearns (2003) has recently emphasized, Vendler adopted this distinction from Ryle (1949), who already distinguished « task verbs » like search or participate, which denote an action, and « achievement verbs » or « failure verbs » like find or lose, which denote a possible achievement (or failure) obtained through this action. The term achievement suggests by itself that Ryle's distinction is not merely a temporal one, as Vendler's one is. As is well known too, the distinction between accomplishments and achievements has been criticized for several reasons. A first counterargument is proposed by Verkuyl (1972), and developed further by Egg (1995). According to them, punctuality is an extra-linguistic property of situations, not a linguistic feature. To repeat one of Verkuyl's example, draw a circle denotes a durative event if the circle is drawn with a pencil, but can arguably denote a punctual one if it is drawn with a computer. Hence, this predicate cannot be assigned a value for the punctuality feature in its semantics. Several authors have provided strong arguments in defense of the original Vendlerian distinction, and, in particular, against this first counterargument. Pursuing an intuition of Freed (1979) and Mittwoch (1990), Piñón (1997) rejects the definition of punctual events denoted by achievements as « very short » events, and take them literally as events without any duration. Under this second definition, events denoted by achievements are not « instantaneous » in the same sense than flashings or