Categories
Zeno Vendler (1957) classified verbs into four categories: those that express "activity", "accomplishment", "achievement" and "state". Activities and accomplishments are distinguished from achievements and states in that the former allow the use of continuous and progressive aspects. Activities and accomplishments are distinguished from each other by boundedness: activities do not have a terminal point (a point before which the activity cannot be said to have taken place, and after which the activity cannot continue – for example "John drew a circle") whereas accomplishments do. Of achievements and states, achievements are instantaneous whereas states are durative. Achievements and accomplishments are distinguished from one another in that achievements take place immediately (such as in "recognize" or "find") whereas accomplishments approach an endpoint incrementally (as in "paint a picture" or "build a house").
In his discussion of lexical aspect, Bernard Comrie (1976) included the category semelfactive or punctual events such as "sneeze". His divisions of the categories are as follows: states, activities, and accomplishments are durative, while semelfactives and achievements are punctual. Of the durative verbs, states are unique as they involve no change, and activities are atelic (that is, have no "terminal point") whereas accomplishments are telic. Of the punctual verbs, semelfactives are atelic, and achievements are telic. The following table exemplifies examples of lexical aspect in English that involve change (an example of a State is 'know').
| No Duration | Has Duration | |
| Telic | Achievement | Accomplishment |
| realise | drown | |
| Atelic | Semelfactive | Activity |
| knock | walk |
Read more about this topic: Lexical Aspect
Famous quotes containing the word categories:
“all the categories which we employ to describe conscious mental acts, such as ideas, purposes, resolutions, and so on, can be applied to ... these latent states.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“Kitsch ... is one of the major categories of the modern object. Knick-knacks, rustic odds-and-ends, souvenirs, lampshades, and African masks: the kitsch-object is collectively this whole plethora of “trashy,” sham or faked objects, this whole museum of junk which proliferates everywhere.... Kitsch is the equivalent to the “cliché” in discourse.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“The analogy between the mind and a computer fails for many reasons. The brain is constructed by principles that assure diversity and degeneracy. Unlike a computer, it has no replicative memory. It is historical and value driven. It forms categories by internal criteria and by constraints acting at many scales, not by means of a syntactically constructed program. The world with which the brain interacts is not unequivocally made up of classical categories.”
—Gerald M. Edelman (b. 1928)