Class 5 : achievements

Finally, achievements are verbs such askupowa´c, ‘to be buying’,zabija´c, ‘to be killing’, strzela´c, ‘to be shooting’, upija´c si˛e, ‘to be getting drunk’ etc. Thus for the perfectives –kupi´c, ‘to have bought’ etc. – it suffices that:

(87) Initiates(e, f3, t)

(88) ?Happens(e, R), RQnow succeeds.

But recall that while the perfectives, obtained by morphological change, denote achievements themselves, the imperfectives denote the prepara- tory processes leading to them. Thus, for a Class5 imperfective (69) must hold – as for a Class3 imperfective, an ongoing accomplishment – where at d +t a canonical culmination point occurs, in the sense of (70–71), at whichx=c, so that alsof2(c) = f3. (And the remarks on the default per- fective reading of imperfectives from 5.2.4 hold here as well.) Therefore Class5 imperfectives areh+,∓,∓,−iand morphonological-change perfec- tives areh−,−,+,+i.

However, the preparatory phase is not always possible for Class5verbs. This is why noT rajectory, but only (88) is required for the perfective, and can be seen (in a similar vein as Vendler’s examples distinguishing accom- plishments and achievements in English [66, p. 104]) in:

(89) Wystrzelił popped3.sg.mp-pfv

korek

cork odfromszampana.champagnegen

The champagne cork popped.

which does not entail that there had been any preparatory phase. In such cases the imperfective can be (though this seems to be a rare usage) taken to, so to speak, zoom in on the event normally taken to be punctual and treat it as an accomplishment:

(90) Dokładnie

exactly winchwili,momentinstr

kiedy

when wystrzeliwałpopped3.sg.ipfv

korek cork odfrom szampana,

champagnegen

Konrad

Konradd´zgn ˛ałstabbed3.sg.mp-pfv

ksi˛ecia. princeacc

Exactly at the moment when the champagne cork was popping, Konrad stabbed the prince.

This requires the original popping event to have been temporally extended and converts it into a fluent. It is also a clear case of the imperfective serving to reveal more temporal structure (cf. 5.2.1). The more so, since

(90) could be rephrased with the perfective wystrzelił, losing no meaning, only some stylistic elegance.

On the contrary, when there can be a preparatory phase (which, it seems, is determined by the script for the given VP), as in kupowa´c, ‘to be buying’, the imperfective is normally taken to refer to it. A reading like in (90) might occur, though seldom. As usual, the imperfective can be cancelled before the culmination point is reached; the inertia effects take place like in Class3.

However, even when the imperfective allows for a preparatory phase, the above setup allows for it being false and the perfective true. This ac- counts for examples like (21), repeated here:

(21) Upili

got-drunk3.pl.mp-pfv

si˛e,

reflchocia ˙zthough si˛ereflnienotupijali.got-drunk3.pl.ipfv

They have gotten drunk, even though they haven’t been getting drunk.

but is somewhat doubtful when the preparatory phase is a barely dispens- able part of the script:

(91) ? Chocia ˙z

though nicnothingnienotkupował,bought3.sg.ipfv

to

thiskupiłbought3.sg.mp-pfv

pół halfacc

litra. litregen

Even though he hasn’t been buying anything, he has bought a bottle of vodka.

This sound suspicious, but might be acceptable on the reading that he has not intended to buy anything, thus omitting the preparatory phase, but instantaneously and gratuitously he did buy the bottle. It is doubt- ful, though less so if the imperfective is stressed to give a contrastive fo- cus. However, on the interpretation given above, the sentence is not self- contradictory.

Our explanation of such examples being doubtful is that they run afoul of some of the world knowledge contained in the VP’s script. The perfective non-monotonically cancels the negation of the imperfective, so the bottle is bought. Yet the world knowledge contradicts the negation, yielding a pragmatic inference that the buying has been preparationless, hence gratuitous and instantaneous – unlike the imperfective would have it. This explanation holds for such doubtful Class5 cases, but not in Class3, where, the preparatory phase being built in the lexical meaning, similar examples are blatantly unacceptable, e.g.:

(92) * Chocia ˙z

though nicnothingnienotbudował,built3.sg.ipfv

to

thiszbudowałbuilt3.sg.ep-pfv

dom. houseacc

Even though he hasn’t been building anything, he has built a house.

This sentence is self-contradictory; indeed the contradiction is so salient that it would require a very far-fetched implicature to save its felicity.

Finally, it seems that Class5 imperfectives lend themselves to perfic- tivisation not only by means of morphonological change, but of the po- prefix as well. Młynarczyk [42] rules this out on the grounds that the re- sulting forms are inherently iterative. For instance zabija´c, ‘to be killing’ becomes pozabija´c ‘to kill several times’ and kupowa´c, ‘to be buying’ be- comespokupowa´c, ‘to buy several times’. But since the prefix is clearly the delimitative-po-, it is the prefixed imperfective that must already carry the iterative reading (cf. 2.1.2); thus indeed these forms fall outside the scope of our work.40

Nevertheless, they resemble Class4 delimitative-po- perfectives with an additional stipulation – representing the iterativity inherent in the orig- inal imperfective – that more than one instances ofei, the perfective fulfill- ing (88) have taken place. Thus, assuming thatfi has been going on for a bit, (80–83) suffice for the forms at hand, which may thus be aptly dubbed Class5 delimitative-po- perfectives. Thatfi has been going on for a bit in the sense of Definition 18 entails that several tokens of ei have occurred, because the script for the iterative reading imposes a long enough usual duration. This gives the required additional meaning of ‘several times’. Thus the iterative readings could in principle be included in our frame- work.