@inbook{efb3ba8d618b4bfb8102c426e4b49392,
title = "On the acquisition of event culmination",
abstract = "There is quite a high rate of acceptance of telic-perfective predicates as descriptions of non-culminating events in children learning Germanic and Romance languages. What causes children, much more so than adults, to accept non-culminating interpretations of telic-perfective sentences? In this review, I discuss learners{\textquoteright} difficulties in each of three grammatical dimensions that contribute to event culmination: the notion of {\textquoteleft}result{\textquoteright} as encoded in the lexical semantics of verbs, telicity of verb phrases, and perfectivity of tense-aspect morphology. I conclude that telicity and perfectivity do not cause the non-culmination acceptance patterns. Instead, the learnability challenge for event culmination lies in the acquisition of verb meanings. I sketch several new angles for further research, including the role of agentivity of the subject.",
keywords = "verb meaning, telicity, aspect, perfectivity, event culmination, completion entailment, L1 acquisition, scalar semantics, pragmatic inferences",
author = "{van Hout}, Angeliek",
year = "2018",
doi = "10.1075/tilar.24.05hou",
language = "English",
isbn = "9789027201379",
series = "Trends in Language Acquisition Research",
publisher = "John Benjamins Publishers",
pages = "95--121",
editor = "Kristen Syrett and Sudha Arunachalam",
booktitle = "Semantics in Language Acquisition",
}