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Telicity is not a verb aspect. The reading of the notion of telicity, as described in the article, is somewhat strange for me. First of all, it does not seem to be (as described) a feature of a verb at all. Particularly, one cannot say that it is any aspect of a verb. Instead, it is marked on the object, not on the verb. So, it is a syntactical feature of a sentence, not a morphologic feature of a verb. I am very surprised because it looks like if someone undereducated had changed the meaning of the well-defined idea of telicity (as used in, for example, English and Polish).

The telic - atelic difference has in fact virtually nothing to do with aspect. One cannot also say that the Slavic prefix pre- (Polish prze-) is the telicity marker, and the statement that pre- is perfective, is also false. In fact, verbs with prefixes (including pre-) can be either imperfective and perfective, see verb aspect.

That's because the suffix and verb root also matter. So eg. in Slovenian, you have pisati (to write, imperfective), prepisati (to copy, perfective), prepisovati (to copy, imperfective). In Old Slavic, I assume you could also form pisnǫti (to write, perfective) (I guess that's lost for this particular verb because it would be pisniti, but that's already used as the pefective counterpart of piskati (to beep), likely from earlier piskniti - see also tiskati (to print, imperfective) -> natisniti (to print, perfective), so the loss of the k in such clusters is regular), but in Slovenian, you'd use napisati for that (sometimes, the root for the na-form is different and may be a fossilization of a verb whose base form is long gone, eg. delati (to do, imperfective) but narediti (to do, perfective), likely from older rediti (to do, perfective) (cf. Croatian or Serbian raditi)). And sometimes, it's the imperfective form that's from a lost verb, eg. vzeti (to take, perfective), but jemati (to take, imperfective) (originally derived from jeti, to take, imperfective). -- OBrasilo (talk) 01:32, 17 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Telicity is a verb feature but not an aspect. Instead of the reading presented here, it is understood as having the aim included in the meaning of the verb. It has nothing to do with whether the aim was achieved or not. Instead, verbs denoted a completed action are termed perfective, not telic.

Honestly, to me it seems like telicity and perfectivity are one and the same, just that it's telicity when it's marked on the noun and perfectivity when it's marked on the verb. The reason there appear to be both in Finnish is because the root meaning of a verb may be perfective or imperfective. It's the same reason why not all verbs in English take a continuous tense, why Slavic derivation rules are not the same for all verb, and why the meaning of the nominally continuous -i-te iru construction in Japanese is not always continuous. I suspect that by the same toke, in Finnish, not all verbs use the partitive vs. accusative distinction for telicity. - OBrasilo (talk) 01:32, 17 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The telic - atelic division is present in English. As a rule, a given verb can be either telic or atelic. All state verbs (dream, love, believe, understand) are atelic, some action verbs are atelic as well (sing, walk, talk). Many action verbs are telic however (write, come, buy) - they all have an aim incorporated in their meaning.

Note that state verbs are not used, as a rule, in the Progressive aka Continuous Aspect (I am loving you now - ?). Similar restrictions can be observed for telic - atelic verbs. Namely, the Past Simple of telic verbs means they are viewed as completed while the Past Simple of atelic verbs means they are not vieved as completed: John wrote that article in 1950 (telic action) means a complete action but he worked there in 1950 (atelic action) does not mean a complete action and the same about he believed in democracy in his youth (atelic state).

That's simply fossilized verb aspect. The progressive/continuous verb forms are not aspects, but constructions, and are unique to English and most Romance language, but are notably absent from French, Romanian and most Germanic languages. They emerged to replace the aspect and the fact that present simple shifted from a continuous meaning to a frequentative meaning, which also happened in most Romance languages (eg. in Latin, scribō corresponds in meaning to both Italian scrivo (frequentative) and sto scrivendo (progressive), but in Italian it only has the frequentative meaning). - OBrasilo (talk) 01:32, 17 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

To express the incompleteness of a past telic action, one must use the Continuous Aspect: John was writing an article in 1950 (we do not know if he finished or not). This sentence has a sharply different meaning that John wrote an article in 1950. In contrary, the sentences like I worked there in 1950 and I was working there in 1950 (an atelic verb) have the same or very similar meaning (even if the latter suggests an additional duration of the action).

That's because English underwent the same shit as eg. Italian. In German, for example, Johann schrieb can easily mean Johann was writing, while Italian has two ways of expressing that, the progressive stava scrivendo and the imperfect scriveva (this one is inherited from Latin). Unlike the present simple, the imperfect has retained the dual use as both frequentative and progressive. - OBrasilo (talk) 01:32, 17 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

A similar phenomenon can be observed in Perfect and Perfect Continuous Aspects: I have worked and I have been working (atelic) have very similar meanings while I have written and I have been writing (telic) differ (the latter does not seem to denote a completed action). And similarly, none of the two sentences I have lived here since 1960 and I have been living here since 1960 (atelic state) imply the end of the state.

And yet another example. I had been writing a book before I went abroad (both telic) needs the Perfect Continuous Aspect in first part. But a similar I had been working in Boston before I went abroad (the first verb is atelic action) can be replaced with I had worked in Boston before I went abroad.

The telic - atelic difference (as described here by me and not as described in the article) works in Slavic languages as well. The difference manifests itself on the morphologic level: there are differences in imperfective - perfective pairs between telic and atelic verbs.

There are papers on missunderstandings of the notion of telicity (and in particular, on mixing telicity with perfective aspect, just like in this article). They can possible be found on the Net. The source of most of the English examples above (changed partially by me) is An Introductory English-Polish Contrastive Grammar by J. Fisiak, M. Lipińska-Grzegorek and T. Zabrocki, PWN, Warszawa 1978.

-- Grzegorj 11:45, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

How about assuming the problem "using the same term across unrelated languages"? The difference between verb and "non-verb" aspect is a difference in marking. In Finnish, this marking is on the object, since that is what determines whether the action is successful or not. Furthermore, the perfective aspect opposition is lexical in Finnish, but the telicity is grammatical, which is different from English. When talking about specific verbs, consider the fact that verbs of emotion (dream, love, believe, understand) are partitive verbs, i.e. always atelic in Finnish, which mirrors the English case, and shows that it is the same thing. But, the action verbs (sing, walk, talk, write, come, buy) are not necessarily of either telicity, since if the object is not finished, they must be marked atelic. For example, Kävelen maratonia "I am walking a marathon". In these cases, the contrast resembles the perfectivity contrast, but is not "confused" with it as you accuse. --Vuo 13:39, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I see virtually no reason for changing the original meaning of the term "telicity", and of course I'd like using the same term as widely as possible. In English telic / atelic is a verbal feature, that is a verb cannot be, as a rule, telic in one sentences, and atelic in others. The notion was introduced as early as in '50 in the meaning I described (and cited into the article). As far as I know, some scholars in their works on Slavic and Finnic aspect (like Filip), just changed the meaning of the term (for unknown reason) in order to find similarities between Germanic, Slavic and Finnic aspects. Which is more, they have been criticized lately as their argumentation was simply wrong, incorrect, inconsistant with facts, at least for Slavic. See Aspectual Pairing in Polish by Młynarczyk for more details (available here). Grzegorj 17:56, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Speaking of references, this paper [1] describes the Finnic aspect as telicity. --Vuo 16:15, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The OED Online's first definition for telic is "Gram. Of a conjunction or clause: Expressing end or purpose." Its first citation for this definition is from Joseph Emerson Worcester's 1846 Universal and Critical Dictionary of the English Language. So, it's not accurate to say that Howard Garey introduced the term, and it's possible that the term's different applications to verbs were developed independently, rather than by one group's misunderstanding of another. (Granted, Garey's use seems closer to the OED's definition, but still.) Ruakh 06:35, 3 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I wonder the example Luen kirjaa. "I am reading a book" or "I will be reading a book"; no indication is given for the time. In my opinion, the latter translation is unreal. 193.110.109.27 (talk) 11:10, 4 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The main problem with the 'telicity and aspect' section may derive from the fact that telicity is not a morphological category at all, but a semantic feature (verbs that somehow express or do not express an inherent goal of the action) that can have very different morphological realizations in different languages. Finnish marks objects differently for telic/atelic verbs. Swedish occasionally uses prepositions (äta, to eat, (atelic) vs. äta upp (telic)). Navaho uses a prefix na- to mark a category of verbs as atelic. The Navaho situation provides particularly good evidence that telicity and aspect have nothing to do with each other: Navaho distinguishes aspect by means of phonological changes of the verb root, and telicity by means of prefixes. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.226.87.165 (talk) 14:17, 19 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

When reading the article, I instantly reflected Chinese perfective aspect particle 了. It means something was done completely. Similarly, isn't preteriti of Spanish something that has ended? Of course it is a temporal verb conjugation unlike Finnish total object (which is noun case), but the Chinese 了 kind of feels like it captures most of this "self-exhaustive" action. I'd kind of want to add some kind of reference to 了 in the article. Comments? --Sigmundur (talk) 22:31, 24 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Before making any changes to the article, I would like to hear your comments here.

I have just noticed that telicity is defined incorrectly in the article. I am aware of terminological differences but usually telicity is understood as an action that has a conceptual endpoint after which the action exhausts itself. Crucially, it is irrelevant whether the endpoint was achieved or not.

The way telicity is defined now in this article represents completive, or, in some theories, boundedness (completed vs. non-completed). --Russky1802 (talk) 01:48, 20 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Can you come up with a contrasting example? As such your argument does not disprove that these are only alternative ways of saying the same thing. Perhaps this is even a psychological question - do people understand general conceptual endpoints and teleological success in a fundamentally different way, or, are they only casually conflated until finer distinction is necessary for a specific reason? --vuo (talk) 00:04, 30 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

As a Finnish speaker, Russky's comment makes sense. If I eat an apple (syön omenan), it is telic. If I intend to eat an apple (aion syödä omenan), it's still telic whether I in the end eat it or not. Telicity in "apple" refers to self-exhaustion of eating in that apple can't be eaten any more after it's eaten. The common grammatic term I've seen is "total object" (vs "partial object"). I still didn't see anything wrong with the article as it is, but I didn't scan it super thoroughly. --Sigmundur (talk) 22:26, 24 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

But how exactly is that different from the Slavic aspect? Eg. in Slovenian, if I say pojedel bom jabolko (I will/am going to eat an apple), it also has an endpoint, whether or not I actually eat it in the end or not. The only difference I notice is that in Slovenian, the present tense only really has a present meaning when the verb is imperfective, eg. jem jabolko (I am eating an apple). With a pefective verb, it more indicates a certain future - jutri pojem jabolko (tomorrow, I am going to eat an apple) or počakaj, da pojem jabolko (let me finish eating the apple), and that's because, since the action is currently on-going, the conceptual endpoint is by definition in the future. Though, if the starting point is in the present, it has the future perfect meaning, so jutri pojem jabolko can also mean "tomorrow, I will have eaten the apple [that I am already eating now]". Now, for the past tense, the end point can be either in the past (because the simple past has largely replaced the now-disused plusquamperfect) or in the present, so eg. pojedel sem jabolko can either have terminated already before another action, so I had eaten the apple (in more archaic Slovenian, that'd be the plusquampefect pojedel sem bil jabolko), or it can have terminated by the present, so I have eaten the apple or I ate the apple. - OBrasilo (talk) 01:42, 17 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The verb 'shoot' simply means releasing a projectile and hitting a target with it. Not hitting the target would usually involve the addition of 'at' (Pamour (talk) 13:54, 30 July 2013 (UTC)).[reply]

The statement that Garey introduced the term telic in 1957 is nonsense. Telic has been used to indicate a verb having an end or a purpose (or a goal) since more than 100 years earlier than that, Worcester's Universal Dictionary of the English Language (published 1846) gave that definition for telic, quoting Prof Stuart. The OED (^[1] has 8 examples of its use in that sense from 1846 to 1906 (I think they were all in the 1st, 1911, edition of the "telic" page), and will probably have more examples when newer editions get round to that page (the third edition hasn't yet come out for that page, and I don't know whether even the second edition has).Michealt (talk) 17:59, 19 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]