Fred Whibley

Predicates that denote some sort of process in the past often entail that the endpoint has been reached. Take, “I burned the book” – the fact that a book has become “burned” is more or less taken for granted as true. It would be contradictory if I said “I burned the book, but it didn’t get burned”, for example.

However, in many languages around the world, event endpoints are not as clearly entailed. This gives rise to a phenomenon known as ‘non-culmination’, where sentences like the above are possible. While this phenomenon has been documented in a multitude of languages, including English, the crosslinguistic patterns it presents remain a complex and open question.

My research seeks to shed light on the crosslinguistic semantics of non-culmination. I aim to develop an explanatory theory for why non-culmination occurs and why it exhibits substantial variability across languages, predicates, and contexts.

To accomplish this, I will conduct elicitation interviews and larger-scale judgment-in-context tests in several of the world’s languages. These tests will help evaluate theories and predictions about the distribution of non-culminating predicates.

The research will also contribute to a growing body of work focussing on crosslinguistic variation in the semantic domain.