What's the Deal with Semelfactives? is one example of a linguistic reserach project which I completed at the University of California, Santa Cruz. This paper deals with linguistic reasoning and semantics.
Excerpt:
Kearns (2000) and Dowty (1979) wrote about aspects of verbal predicates and suggested diagnostics to differentiate them. An aspect distinguishes “different ways of viewing the internal temporal constituency of a situation” (Dowty). Aspectual classes have to do with whether a verbal predicate (VP) is bounded (having a natural finishing point beyond which the event cannot continue), durative (the event occupies some time, instead of being instantaneous), and presence or absence of change (i.e. whether the event is heterogeneous or homogenous from moment to moment). Different combinations of these three characteristics yield different aspectual classes. Four classes - state, achievement, activity, accomplishment - are relatively easy to define. But there is still one that eludes us -- and that is the “semelfactive.” I explored the meaning of the classes, and make claims about the value of their telicity, durative-ness, and homogeneity.
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