Only states can be gradable

Abstract

In this paper I study Spanish sound emission verbs (sonar ‘to ring’) and degree achievements (enfriar ‘to cool’), which are intriguing insofar as they turn out to express gradable events, and argue that they are not gradable, although they can trigger quantity readings whereby there is a degree whose value changes throughout the event. Thus, my analysis aligns with other works on different languages (Japanese, German, Catalan and English) that have already pointed out that stativity is necessary to license gradability in certain syntactic constructions. However, my proposal goes a step forward insofar as it explicitly formulates that events cannot be gradable and explains in precise terms why gradability requires stativity. Assuming that activities are divisible into intervals and states into subintervals, I argue that gradability is only possible for the latter because it consists in measuring subintervals in intensity.