Nouns Affect Aspect Syntactically

The starred for-adverbial in (1a) reflects standard judgments: in the presence of a DP direct object like a cake—which following terminology by Borer (2005) is referred to here as a Q(uantity)-DP— with an incremental theme verb like eat, the VP is telic. In contrast, in (1b), with a mass noun direct object like cake—referred to here as a non-Q-DP—the VP is atelic. Although these are the patterns commonly noted, for over 20 years now, mainly in footnotes, it has been observed that there is an atelic grammatical interpretation of (1a) (see for instance Alsina 1999, Jackendoff 1996, Piñón 2008, Smollet 2005, Tenny 1987, Verkuyl 1993) illustrated in (2).