Progressive achievements in English

Abstract

This paper explores the preliminary process reading that arises from achievements in the progressive. The meaning of the progressive as a partitive operator poses challenges in the formalization of its occurrence with punctual predicates like achievements. I discuss problems with prior proposals (Rothstein 2004, Bohnemeyer 2005), and argue that the preliminary process reading should be accounted for in terms of the meaning of achievements rather than the meaning of the progressive. Based on Bach’s (1981) subdivision of achievements, I propose to analyze culmination-achievements as denoting a set of complex events which consist of a preliminary process and its culmination, while analyzing happening-achievements as a set of simple events of culmination. I show how the lexical specifications of the two subtypes of achievements result in the different patterns in the progressive. Furthermore, I argue that culmination-achievements differ from accomplishments in terms of the discourse statuses of the implications which are associated with their two subevents. Building on previous studies on projective contents (e.g. Simons et al. 2011, Tonhauser et al. 2013, 2018), I take a close look at the properties of the process implication triggered by culmination-achievements, and show that it is projective content.