Computational lexical semantics, incrementality, and the so-called punctuality of events

Abstract

The distinction between achievements and accomplishments is known to be an empirically important but subtle one. It is argued here to depend on the atomicity (rather than punctuality) of events, and to be strongly related to incrementality (i.e., to event-object mapping functions). A computational treatment of incrementality and atomicity is discussed in the paper, and a number of related empirical problems considered, notably lexical polysemy in verb - argument relationships.