Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

In the past few years, investigations of lexical aspect, particularly in formal
semantics, have also uncovered a third domain of aspectual categorization that, as it turns
out, is particularly relevant to investigations of Sumerian: the primary examples of this
phenomenon in the linguistics literature—dominated, as it is, by English
morphosyntax—are resultative and depictive secondary predication in English. Older
investigations of secondary predication can be associated quite clearly with what are
known as small clauses such as “John leave” in “Mary saw [ SC John leave]” (Stowell
1981; 1983; cf. Stowell 1995 and references therein), but the importance of secondary
predication as a lexical aspectual phenomenon has only been clearly identified and dealt
with in the past few years, so I would like to take a moment to introduce it before moving
on to the specifically Sumerian questions that occupy the rest of the chapter. If we apply
one of the standard tests for telicity (co-occurrence with bound [“in three hours”] and
unbound [“for three hours”] temporal adverbials) to a series of increasingly complicated
English predicates, an interesting pattern emerges (although the following example has
become the standard one used in the secondary literature, its proximate source is
Rothstein 2004).
(2) a. He hammered it for three hours / **in three hours. (“atelic”)
b. He hammered it out for three hours / in three hours. (“telic”)
c. He hammered it flat **for three hours / in three hours. (“resultative”)
101