Aktionsart: States vs. Events

Mithun (1991:512–4) uses lexical aspect or Aktionsart to account for the two intransitive verb classes of Colloquial Guaraní: SA verbs denote events (“the activities, accomplishments, and achievements of Vendler 1967, adopted in Van Valin 1990” [1991:513]), whereas S_O verbs describe states, characterized by time stability. In Guaraní, SA verbs include go, walk, run, come, swim, dance, play, work, fall, sleep, while typical S_O verbs are be sick, be hungry, be wet, be weak, beshort, be round, be wise, be strong/powerful, be lazy. There are very few exceptions, and Mithun provides convincing explanations for them.

In Cariban languages, most time-stable states are not verbs but adverbs/ adjectives or nouns (e.g. Tiriyó kure ‘good, well, pretty’, kaw6 ‘high, tall’, piya ‘small’ [adverbs], mono ‘big (one)’, kainan ‘new (one)’ [nouns]). Nouns and adverbs/adjectives can occur as predicates simply by taking a subject NP (20a)–(20b), or as adverbial complements in a copular construction (1c)–(1d).

(1)

Some state-describing verbs do exist, as seen in Table 1. By itself, the copula does not describe a state, but rather serves as a connector between the state indicating adverbial complement and the subject. The other verbs may conceivably have inceptive/inchoative rather than (or perhaps together with) stative meanings; since the glosses are either taken from secondary sources or are the result of fieldwork on a previously unstudied language, they must be considered approximative.

Table 1. State-describing verbs in Cariban languages.

 With this in view, the stative/eventive opposition seems to correlate (though perhaps with exceptions) with a lexical distinction between verbs (denoting events) and adverbs/adjectives and nouns (denoting states) rather than with the distinction between SA and SO intransitive verbs.