1082: Telic and Ateilic Verbs Nov 25, 2017

There are lots of ways to describe types of words, and all of them have different applications. Words are broken up into well-known categories like ‘nouns’, ‘verbs’ ‘adjectives’ etc based upon the way they function in a clause. Beyond that, types of words in various lexical classes are also broken into categories like ‘mass nouns’ and ‘count nouns’ which have different sorts of meanings when they get pluralized or have determiners, such as ‘milk’ and ‘cookie’ respectively, but classifications for words are not always—albeit they usually are—syntactic. Telic verbs, for example, relate to actions or goals that have a defined end, such as “build” whereas atelic verbs do not. This does relate to syntax, as certain phrases can only be added to certain verbs, such as “he ran in an hour” which sounds bad, while “he built (something) in an hour” is fine, but this is also somewhat of a semantic issue.