An eventuality is a situation that takes place in the world. Aktionsart and aspect both refer to the internal temporal composition of an eventuality. Aktionsart is widely regarded as a category by which lexical items can be sorted in terms of internal temporal constituency (Binnick 1991, Comrie 1976). In English there are a number of manifestations of Aktionsart, which is said to be the objective description of the eventuality (as opposed to subjective ‘aspect’).

In a landmark study, Vendler (1957) divided verbs into the categories ‘activity’, ‘accomplishment’, ‘achievement’ and ‘state’. Activities and accomplishments are distinguished from achievements and states because the former allow the possible use of continuous tenses. Activities and accomplishments are distinguished by boundedness: activities do not have a terminal point (a point before which the activity cannot be said to have taken place, and after which the activity cannot continue – for example ‘John drew a circle’) whereas accomplishments do. Of achievements and states, achievements are instantaneous whereas states are durative.

In his discussion of Aktionsarten, Comrie (1976) included the category ‘semelfactive’. His divisions of the categories are as follows: states, activities, and accomplishments are durative, while semelfactives and achievements are punctual. Of the durative verbs, states are unique as they involve no change, and activities are atelic (that is, have no ‘terminal point’) whereas accomplishments are telic. Of the punctual verbs, semelfactives are atelic, and achievements are telic. The following table exemplifies examples of Aktionsart in English that involve change (an example of a State is 'know').

See also

• Grammatical aspect

References

• Binnick, R. I. (1991) Time and the Verb: A Guide to Tense & Aspect. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Comrie, B. (1976) Aspect: An Introduction to the Study of Verbal Aspect and Related Problems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Vendler, Z. (1957) ‘Verbs and Times’, The Philosophical Review 66:143-60.

Further reading

• De Swart, H. and Verkuyl, H. (1999) Tense and Aspect in Sentence and Discourse. Reader, ESSLLI summer school, Utrecht. Aug. 9-13, 1999.
• Moens, M. (1987) Tense, Aspect and Temporal Reference. PhD Thesis, Centre for Cognitive Science, University of Edinburgh.
• Smith, C. S. (1997) The Parameter of Aspect (2nd ed). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
• Verkuyl, H. J. (1993) A Theory of Aspectuality: The interaction between temporal and atemporal structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.