Telicity as a Semantic Parameter

As a point of departure, we take the empirical hypothesis that only a small number of verb roots (i.e., simple, underived verbs) lexically incorporates an ordering criterion with respect to which events in their denotation could be maximalized. It follows then that the vast majority of maximal predicates is endocentrically built from verb roots by combining them with expressions that impose an ordering on the unordered sets of events denoted by verb roots. Different languages will use different strategies for the expression of the ordering criterion. They will be partly dictated by what type of information a given language packages into verb roots and morphological operations on verbs. Hence, the telicity parameter proposed in (1) is an attempt at addressing the following question: