Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

2.4 The curious morphosyntax of progressive achievements
Although lexical and grammatical aspect show various kinds of interaction, one of the
more dramatic is actually negative in form: achievement predicates such as the members
of the BNBV inal class do not usually occur in the progressive/imperfective aspect. As
already noted above, what is generally termed the “progressive” aspect in disciplinary
semantics is presumably equivalent to the “imperfective” (marû) aspect in Sumerian and
in the following sections, as above, “progressive/imperfective” should be considered a
cover term for “progressive” and “imperfective.” 21 Rothstein identifies the basic
incompatibility of achievements and progressive/imperfective aspect as follows:
Since achievement verbs denote eventuality types which are near instantaneous and
which are over as soon as they have begun, they ought to be incompatible with the
progressive mode which asserts that an event is ‘in progress,’ and which we expect
to be restricted to activities and accomplishments. (Rothstein 2004, 36)
But the curious thing about achievement predicates is that they do at times occur in the
imperfective (Rothstein 2004, 23-24). This section presents the BNBV inal class as
prototypical exemplars of the achievement lexical aspectual class, argues that they do not
regularly occur in the progressive/imperfective (marû) aspect, and ends with a few
suggestions as to further possible evidence having to do with the case-marking and non-
agentivity of their subjects.
21 Strictly speaking, the marked category in the Sumerian grammatical aspectual system is the imperfective (marû) and
in accord with convention should be described with a positive descriptor such as “progressive” or “continuative” (I
prefer the latter). Since markedness is privative and not equipollent (Agha 1993, 132-133), the unmarked term in the
system (˙amt≥u) would then be described as non-progressive or non-continuative. But I worry that changing established
terminology on the basis of non-Assyriological convention (which is not consistently followed even in disciplinary
linguistics) would only multiply terms and confuse matters, so I have retained the traditional terminology in part.
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