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In linguistics, telicity (from the Greek τέλος, meaning "end" or "goal") is the property of a verb or verb phrase that presents an action or event as being complete in some sense. A verb or verb phrase with this property is said to be ''telic'', while a verb or verb phrase that presents an action or event as being ''incomplete'' is said to be ''atelic''. ==Testing for telicity in English== One common way to gauge whether an English verb phrase is telic is to see whether such a phrase as ''in an hour'', in the sense of "within an hour", (known as a ''time-frame adverbial'') can be applied to it. Conversely, a common way to gauge whether the phrase is atelic is to see whether such a phrase as ''for an hour'' (a ''time-span adverbial'') can be applied to it.〔Verkuyl, Henk. 1972. ''On the compositional nature of aspects.'' Dordrecht:Reidel.〕〔Dowty, David. 1979. ''Word meaning and Montague Grammar.'' Dordrecht: Reidel. ISBN 90-277-1009-0.〕〔Krifka, Manfred 1989. Nominal reference, temporal constitution and quantification in event semantics. In Renate Bartsch, Johan van Benthem and Peter van Emde Boas (eds.), ''Semantics and Contextual Expression:'' 75-115. Dordrecht: Foris. ISBN 90-6765-443-4.〕〔Verkuyl, Henk. 1993. ''A theory of aspectuality: the interaction between temporal and atemporal structure.'' Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-56452-2〕 This can be called the ''time-span/time-frame test''. According to this test, the verb phrase ''built a house'' is telic, whereas the minimally different ''built houses'' is atelic: :Fine: "John built a house in a month." :Bad: *"John built a house for a month." ::→ ''built a house'' is telic :Bad: *"John built houses in a month." :Fine: "John built houses for a month." ::→ ''built houses'' is atelic Other phrases can be tested similarly; for example, ''walked home'' is telic, because "John walked home in an hour" is fine, while "John walked home for an hour" is bad, and ''walked around'' is atelic, because "John walked around in an hour" is bad, while "John walked around for an hour" is fine. In applying this test, one must be careful about a number of things. *The tense and aspect of a verb may affect the result of this test; for example, phrases with progressive verb forms (''is going'', ''was talking'', ''has been doing'', and so on) almost always accept ''for an hour'' and almost never accept ''in an hour''. The test is therefore primarily of interest for verb phrases with verbs in the simple past tense. *The phrase ''in an hour'', and phrases like it, are ambiguous; they can mean either "in the span of an hour", i.e. "within an hour", or "one hour from now". Only the former meaning is of interest; "She will be coming in an hour" is fine, but that says nothing about the telicity of the phrase ''will be coming''. *Strictly speaking, there is a context in which "John built houses in a month" is fine; consider "Jack took three months to build a house, while John built houses in a month." Here, what is meant is "John built houses; he built each house in a month"; and in this sense, ''built houses'' is actually telic. It can be argued that the verb phrase "build houses" is, in fact, ''telic'' at one level and ''atelic'' at another: the telicity applies to the verb without the plural object, and the atelicity applies to the verb and the object together. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Telicity」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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