Agents and goals

Table 4.4 presents a selection of further examples of the four situation types and classifies them according to goal-directedness and whether or not there is an instigator (termed an agent).

The referent of an argument is an agent if the language encodes it as consciously responsible for what happens. Without naming it, the concept was introduced earlier in connection with unergative clauses, which have agent subjects, and unaccusatives, which do not. Carefully was offered as a test for agency. It produces strange results with all six of the sentences in the top half of Table 4.4, for example *Even small contributions carefully count, *I carefully heard a bang, indicating that the subjects of states and achievements are not agents, which is why they have been given a minus for the feature agent. If such sentences are intransitive, like: Even small contributions count, then they are unaccusative. Activities and accomplishments are annotated ± for agency because some of them have agents but some do not: courts can carry out their functions carefully and someone can listen carefully, but some of the other sentences in the lower half of the table are semantically weird with carefully, for example *He carefully slept, *The river carefully flooded the meadow. Although ±agent is not a very interesting characterization of activities and accomplishments, the absence of agency from states and achievements does identify one feature of their meaning clearly.

By the way, even though sleeping is a rather inert process, it is nonetheless encoded in English as an activity. It passes the tests in Table 4.3 and it can be used to answer What … do? questions: “What did he do?” “He slept”. But this is inappropriate with states: “He owned a pair of jeans” is not a reasonable answer to “What did Axel do?”

Achievements and accomplishments are directed towards goals6 – end-points after which the event is over: for instance the event encoded in Axel received a pair of jeans has been achieved the moment Axel has those jeans; the action of the meadow flooding has been accomplished when the meadow reaches a flooded state. Among the tests that Vendler (1967) put forward for distinguishing among situation types were time preposition phrases with in and for

Acceptability with an in-time phrase, such as in twenty seconds or in four hours, diagnoses the presence of a goal. She realized in twenty seconds that 512 was eight cubed indicates that the flash of realization came twenty seconds after some point that is not actually specified in the achievement sentence – perhaps timing started when she was set an arithmetical puzzle. And it is the same with achievement sentences generally: an in-phrase specifies, from some prior point external to the encoded situation, how long it takes before the achievement happens. For another example, here is (4.7a) with an in-phrase: She got her ankle sprained in ten minutes – perhaps from the start of the game.

With accomplishments an in-time phrase represents the time taken up with the activity that leads to the achievement (see (4.8) if you need a reminder about the components encoded in an accomplishment). Thus The court heard all the evidence in four hours says there was a four-hour listening phase (including note-taking and whatever other legal activities normally form part of it) at the end of which there was an achievement – all the evidence had been heard and the evidence then had the status (a word related to state) of ‘heard evidence’. It is the same with other accomplishments, for example (4.7d), modified with an in-time phrase: She got better in ten days; the healing activity that culminated in her regaining good health lasted for ten days.

It is different when an in-phrase is put with situation types that lack a goal (states and activities). This leads either to semantic oddity or it pushes them over into the achievement class. You sound hoarse in five minutes could be taken as a warning that some kind of vocal malpractice leads rapidly to hoarseness, but that kind of transition is an achievement, not a state. Instead of being understood as an activity clause, He slept in five minutes is likely to be interpreted as an achievement clause meaning ‘He fell asleep in five minutes’.

States and activities go comfortably with for-phrases, however. These specify the duration of the state or activity: for example Axel owned a pair of jeans for a week, He slept for an hour. Because a goal is not part of the meaning, no sudden change at the end is encoded: Axel might or might not have got rid of his jeans at the end of the week; the person who slept could wake up after the hour or sleep on for another hour; the end is not made explicit.

For-duration phrases with achievements and accomplishments lead to mixed results, depending on whether they are interpreted as indicating the length of the end-state or – with accomplishments – the length of the activity phase. The achievement Axel received a pair of jeans for a week can be understood as meaning that the goal state of his having the jeans lasted for a week; after that he was expected to give them up. With an accomplishment, like They planted the field with rye for a week, two interpretations are generally possible: ‘the goal-state of the field being planted with rye lasted for a week’ and after that they replaced it with oats; or the field was enormous and the work was slow, so ‘the activity of planting rye in the field lasted for a week’ – the goal was to plant the whole field with rye, but the sentence with the for-phrase having the activity as its scope does not say whether the goal was reached. (Given that the speaker could just as easily have explicitly signaled completion by saying They planted the field with rye in a week, there is a pragmatic inference – an implicature – encouraged by the use of the for-phrase, namely that planting on the occasion in question stopped before the goal was achieved.)

Locative goal phrases, like to the corner, on to the plateau or home, when used with motion verbs like walk, crawl, swim or fly, have a role in accomplishment clauses. They specify the goal that ends the activity phase of the accomplishment. In the accomplishment encoded by: The hikers walked to Crianlarich, this instance of walking activity ends with an understood embedded achievement ‘they got to Crianlarich’, which itself includes an understood end-state ‘they were [then] in Crianlarich’. The completive particle up in The campers are packing up does a similar job of specifying the goal.

With many accomplishments a direct object noun phrase – particularly if it is definite – delimits the activity. The field, direct object in They planted the field with rye, gives the measure of the rye-planting activity: it is over when the field is planted. A superficially similar sentence is They planted rye in the field. Here the locative argument the field is no longer direct object; what we could call the “material” argument rye is the direct object. There is an interesting meaning difference here and, to highlight it, indefinite rye has been made definite the rye in (4.10).

When the field, direct object in (4.10a), has been completely planted, the goal has been accomplished, even if there is some rye left over. On the other hand, with the rye in direct object position (4.10b), the activity phase is over when the rye has been completely used up, even if a part of the field is left without rye. Spray, smear and load are among other verbs that pattern in the same way – either the locative argument or the “material” argument appears as direct object, and the other one of these two comes as a preposition phrase (with the rye or in the field).

We will introduce the distinction between mass and count nouns, partly a matter of different words (for instance, bread is a mass noun, but loaf is a count noun) and partly a matter of grammatical marking (I don’t eat much cake illustrates a mass use of the noun cake, but cake is a count noun in I don’t eat many cakes). At a rather abstract level, there is a parallel with some of what was noted above regarding goals. The language treats both states and activities as homogenous, like mass uses of nouns: asking how long the state or activity went on for is similar to asking how much cake or bread is involved. On the other hand, similar to count uses of nouns, we saw that accomplishments and achievements are delimited (sometimes overtly by means of in-time phrases, definite direct objects and so on) and individuated (remember the discussion of restitutive again). As with mass–count in nouns, goal-directedness is partly a matter of using different verbs (smile – activity, but explode – achievement) and partly a matter of how the clause is constructed (The children counted aloud – activity, but, The cashier counted the day’s takings – accomplishment).