Culmination phenomena across languages

Abstract

This article examines culmination phenomena from a cross-linguistic perspective. It provides an overview of various (non-)culmination readings that sentences in different languages may receive in light of much prior literature on this topic, especially from the past 2 decades. An important goal is to showcase facts of defeasible versus entailed culmination and discuss how scholars have dealt with these facts in recent analyses. Although (non-)culmination phenomena are often approached from a semantic perspective in the literature, in the second part of the paper, I also address questions of syntactic representation regarding verbal predicates associated with maximal versus non-maximal event interpretations. This survey of the empirical landscape ultimately shows that, despite the plethora of works on event culmination, there are still numerous puzzles in need of explanation, especially when culmination is examined from a cross-linguistic angle.