Robert Van Valin jr.: Achievements and Accomplishments

The terms 'achievement' and 'accomplishment' have been used in the analysis and description of the semantic properties of verbs (and verb phrases) since their introduction in Vendler's seminal paper (1957). The interpretation of these terms, however, has often not been in terms of Vendler’s original work but rather in terms of Dowty (1979)’s reanalysis and decomposition of them.  For Vendler, achievements differed primarily from accomplishments along the punctual/non-punctual dimension, with achievements being punctual and accomplishments non-punctual.  For Dowty, on the other hand, they are differentiated along two dimensions, punctual/non-punctual and causative/non-causative, with accomplishments being non-punctual, telic and causative.  Early work in Role and Reference Grammar [RRG] (e.g. Foley & Van Valin 1984, Van Valin 1990, 1993) followed the Dowty interpretation and decomposition, but this led to a number of problems, e.g. since telicity and causality are linked, atelic verbs cannot be causative, but there are many examples of atelic causative verbs, e.g. the sergeant marched the soldiers in the park for an hour.  The search for a solution to these problems led to the revised Aktionsart classifications in Van Valin & LaPolla (1997) and Van Valin (2005), in which all basic Vendler classes have a causative counterpart. 

The purpose of this paper is to explore the properties of achievements and accomplishments, with the goal of explicating their properties leading to a revised decomposition for them.    The two classes have been considered telic change-of-state predicates with a result state, but there are change-of-state predicates which signal a change without a result, and some languages, e.g. Mparntwe Arrernte (Australia) and Lakhota (North America) explicitly code the difference between change and change+result in verbal expressions.  A great deal of discussion has focused on another kind of accomplishment, namely the telic use of activity verbs, e.g. The boy ran to the store in fifteen minutes, where an atelic manner-of-motion verb is used telicly.  In RRG these are termed ‘active accomplishments’ in order to distinguish them from ‘plain accomplishments’ like intransitive dry, melt, freeze and die.