Vendler: "Verbs and Times" (1957)

As with his paper on quantifiers, I read this paper in Linguistics in Philosophy (1967), but it first appeared in Philosophical Review in 1957. It's also floating around the internet here and there.

The Aspectual Garden

The paper is essentially a presentation of a taxonomy of verbal aspects.

Vendler makes a distinction between verbs that express states, and verbs that don't. Among those that don't, he distinguishes between those that have no clear end goals, and those that do.

Among processes with end goals, he distinguishes between those that consist only of a change of state, and those that consist both of an extended process and a change of state.

Here is his taxonomy with the names he uses:

• States are extended processes which involve no action and produce no change;
• Activities are extended processes which involve action but still produce no change;
• Accomplishments are extended processes which culminate in a change of state;
• Achievements are punctual events which consist of a change of state.

In my textbook on semantics, these classes are described by sorting them first according to the static/dynamic dimension, and then by plugging the dynamic verbs into the four cells of a table with a telic/atelic dimension and a durative/punctual dimension.

The result of this analysis is that Vendler's "achievements" are split into two classes: punctual atelic semelfactives and punctual telic achievements. Activities would then be the durative atelic processes, and accomplishments would be the durative telic ones. All static verbs are still lumped together in one big class called states.

This alternative model is taken from Carlota Smith's The Parameter of Aspect (first edition, 1991).

Diagnostics for the Classes

Vendler's taxonomy involves three different dimensions of difference. He himself proposes a number of tests that can distinguish the two poles of each dimension.

The Progressive Test

The easiest distinction to make is the one between static verbs and everything else. As Vendler notes, only dynamic verbs accept progressive forms (p. 99), so one can't say things like

• *I am resembling …
• *I am owning …
• *I am resenting …

For the same reason, one can also not answer the question

• What are you doing?

with a static sentence.

The Completion Time Test

Since telic processes have an implied end state, it makes sense to ask how long such a process took (to accomplish). For atelic processes, this frequently makes less sense (p. 100–101):

• I takes me forever to write an email. (durative, telic)
• *It took me all afternoon to sit in my chair. (durative, atelic)
• It took the bomb an hour to explode. (punctual, telic)
• ?I took me an hour to cough. (punctual, atelic)

However, this test is not very reliable, since one can also construe the atelic verb as designating a desired end state of some other process. For instance, if I want to sneeze but can't, the sentence it takes me a long time to sneeze sound less weird.

A bit of googling shows that people occasionally do write things like that. The verb sleep also provides a good problematic example.

The Temporal Extension Test

Reversely, one can ask for the amount of time spent on an atelic process, but not a telic one:

• *I wrote an email for an hour. (durative, telic)
• I sat in my chair all afternoon. (durative, atelic)
• *The bomb exploded for an hour. (punctual, telic)
• I coughed for an hour. (punctual, atelic)

However, this test also rules out atelic processes that can not easily be "ground" into repeated actions:

• *I took a breath for an hour. (punctual, atelic)
• ?I sneezed a single time for an hour. (punctual, atelic)
• *He died throughout 1918. (punctual, atelic)

The test can thus only reliably be used to distinguish between telic and atelic processes in the durative case. In the punctual, things might go wrong.

The Homogeneity Test

Although durative telic processes have a completion time, this completion time cannot be interpreted as a temporal extension. If it took me an hour to reach the summit, that doesn't mean that I was engaged in an activity called "reaching the summit" in that whole period (p. 104).

This difference can also be exploited in a test:

I wrote my first draft between 9 and 12                 

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––  (invalid?)

I wrote my first draft between 10 and 11.                

I ran aimlessly around between 9 and 12             

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––  (valid)

I ran aimlessly around between 10 and 11.            

I realized how wrong I was between 9 and 12                 

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––  (invalid)

I realized how wrong I was between 10 and 11.                

I coughed loudly between 9 and 12              

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––  (valid)

I coughed loudly between 10 and 11.             

However, this test isn't perfect either. While it does select precisely the atelic processes in these cases, the test might actually reject paradigmatically telic processes like write a letter or draw a circle. It is not always clear that the time interval pertains to the end point of the process rather than the process as a whole.

The Twice Test

Vendler doesn't mention this, but it should be mentioned that although we can almost always "grind" punctual processes into durative ones, we can counteract this tendency by insisting one counting the events in questions:

• I blinked twice.
• I blinked for an hour.
• ?I blinked twice for an hour.

To see to what extent this test is able to separate durative from punctual verbs, we can try to plug sleep into the same frame:

• I slept twice.
• I slept for an hour.
• I slept twice for an hour.

Is this last sentence acceptable? If so, we have a working diagnostic; if not, we have a problem.

The Spot Test

Although punctual processes can almost always be "ground" into durative ones, it is difficult for a punctual verb to have a durative complement. Concretely, Vendler notes the difference (p. 114):

• I saw him run.
• I saw him cross the street.
• *I spotted him run.
• *I spotted him cross the street.

This observation, however, does not sit easily with the fact that you can realize how wrong you were or, even worse, that you can realize how wrong you always were.

Vendler: "Each and Every, Any and All" (1962)

This paper was first published in Mind in 1962, by just like everybody else, I read the version reprinted in the Linguistics in Philosophy (1967). It discusses the meaning of the words in the title and is famous for having described the meaning of any in terms of a certain "freedom of choice" (p. 80).

Each, Every, and All

Vendler describes the differences between each, every, and all in terms of collective reference vs. individual reference. His theory is that all is collective, while each and every are distributive.

We thus have differences like

• You can buy each of these items for $5 (distributive)
• You can buy all of these items for $5 (collective)

Every, on the other hand, can be seen as a quantification over all the distributive attributions so that "every is between each and all" in meaning (p. 77). We thus get — according to my intuitions — slightly more ambiguous examples with every:

• You can buy every one of these items for $5

According to my intuition, this could lean towards both a collective ($5 in total) and a distributive reading ($5 per item).

The Blank Check

Vendler describes his ideas about any nicely in this quote:

To say

Any doctor will tell you …

is to issue a blank warranty for conditional predictions: you fill in the names. You choose Dr. Jones; well, then he will tell you if you ask him. You pick twenty-five others; then, I say, they will tell you if you consult them. (p. 85)

 This means that

… the any-proposition is an unrestricted warranty for conditional statements or forecasts and, we may add, for contrary-to-fact conditionals. In other words, to draw an obvious conclusion, it is an open hypothetical, a lawlike assertion. (p. 89)

 I like the phrase "open hypothetical." It both highlights why any can be used in couterfactuals and other modals, and why it does not have existential import.

Vendler also notes that every single time any is used, it issues this blank warranty anew:

… I can certainly not say

*He took any one

even if you acted on my words: Take any one. […] Any calls for a choice, but after it has been made any loses its point. (p. 81)

In other words, once all the facts are settled, you cannot use any to make a report, since "facts are not free" (p. 84).

Any and The Pragmatics of Preferences

One more quote from his explanation:

With Take any one, it is up to you to do the determining; here it does not make sense to ask back, Which one? Thus while in the former case [Take one] I merely fail to determine, in the latter case [Take any one] I call upon you to determine, in other words, I grant you unrestricted liberty of individual choice. (p. 79–80)

He notes that this also explains why a command like You must take any seems odd. Interestingly, though, the British National Corpus does contain examples like the following:

• You must report any losses immediately.

It is probably fair to paraphrase this sentence as

• If you have any losses, you must report them immediately.

So it appears that you can in fact order people to take any apple, but only if they are placed in an environment in which they are exposed to apples, and they be tempted to not take all of them (so to speak).

A Probabilistic Interpretation of Any

The last thing Vendler does in the article is to informally sketch a way that the difference between any, every, and all could be implemented in a compositional probabilistic semantics:

A bag contains a hundred marbles. We inspect ten at random and all ten are red. Then the probability that any one marble we care to pick out of the hundred will be red is quite high. Yet the probability of every one's being red is much lower. (p. 94)

 I interpret this the following way: When you evaluate the formula

• All the marbles are red.

you are really asking for the posterior probability that the relevant parameter is 1. When you ask

• Some of the marbles are red.

you are asking for the posterior probability that the parameter is larger than 0. However, when you evaluate the formula

• Any marble we draw will be red.

you are looking for the posterior probability that one randomly drawn marble will be red, given your evidence. This amounts to summing up the probabilities of the statements

• The bag contains 100 red marbles, and if I draw one at random, it will be red.
• The bag contains 99 red marbles, and if I draw one at random, it will be red.
• The bag contains 98 red marbles, and if I draw one at random, it will be red.
• …

To take an example with slightly lower numbers, suppose I have drawn a marble twice from a bag of 10 marbles, and that in both cases, I drew a red marble. Then the posterior probability of the different parameter settings are shown in the graph below:

With these numbers, we get the probabilities

• P("All marbles are red") = P(p = 1 | k = 2, n = 2) = 26%
• P("Some marble is red") = 1 – P(p = 0 | k = 2, n = 2) = 1 – 0% = 100%
• P("Any marble is red") = Σ_i P(p = p_i | k = 2) * P(k = 1 | p = p_i, n = 1) = 79%

The sum in the last line then ranges over all the parameters values p = 0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, …, 0.9, 1. As stated by Vendler, the probability of the any-sentence is substantially higher than the probability of the all-sentence.

Horn and Kato: Introduction to Negation and Polarity (2000)

My "negative polarity" reading list currently includes

• the anthology Negation and Polarity (2000), edited by Larry Horn and Yasuhiko Kato;
• William Ladusaw's PhD dissertation, Polarity As Inherent Scope Relations (1979);
• Zeno Vendler's Linguistics in Philosophy (1967);
• Johan Brandtler's The Evaluability Hypothesis (2012).

So far, I've read a chunk of Ladusaw's thesis and the introduction to Negation and Polarity.

The Dull Edge of Negation

Horn and Kato quote an interesting observation by Otto Jespersen (1917) about the historical trajectory of negation marking:

The history of of negative expressions in various languages makes us witness the following curious fluctuation: the original negative adverb is first weakened, then found insufficient and therefore strengthened, generally through some additional word, and this in its turn may be felt as the negative proper and may then in course of time be subject to the same development as the original word. (Jespersen 1917, p. 4, quoted by Horn and Kato on p. 3)

The pragmatic choice of word is thus always in a kind of arms race with itself because of its feedback to semantics.

We see the same phenomenon with curses, politeness markers, and slang words – all of which regularly have to be discarded because their original force wears off. A similar thing happens with taboo concepts like disease, stupidity, or madness, which regularly have to be renamed because the last generation of terms has lost its neutral and clinical value.

The Historical Emergence of Negative Polarity

With respect to negation, Horn and Kato dub this phenomenon "Jespersen's cycle" and claim that it "plays a central role in the development of negative polarity and negative concord" (p. 3).

I am not quite sure how they imagine the mechanics of this development looks, and neither of their contributions to the volume seem to focus specifically on this (etymological) question. However, somebody at the ACLC recently told me that it's only by recent convention that the Dutch word hoeven ("need") has become ungrammatical in positive contexts, and this seems to support their claim.

Another case that might support this case is the existence of very obviously conventional negative polarity items like lift a finger, hurt a fly, and so on. As with many insults and politeness markers, these were presumably scalar implicatures before they were turned into conventional lexical items.

Notice also the syntactic parallel between such cases and the traditional examples of negative polarity:

• Would you mind helping me?
• *You would mind helping me, wouldn't you?
• You wouldn't mind helping me, would you?

compared to

• Do you want anything?
• *You want anything, don't you?
• You don't want anything, do you?

I don't know how far this analogy could be stretched, but there does seem to be something buried here.