Reexamination of Garey's Telic Concept

Abstract

o. In studying the verbal aspect of French Garey presented interesting concepts of telic and atelic constructions. The purpose of this paper is to examine Garey's concepts and similar ones proposed by different linguists, and to define the concepts more vigorously so that they can be used in describing similar phenomena in different languages. The paper will proceed in the following way. In section 1 some data from Kusaiean, English and Korean will be presented. The data from these languages will show a need for classifying verbs into two groups, besides the usual dichotomy of transitive and intransitive verbs, or of stative and nonstative verbs. In section 2 a chronological survey of past works on aspect will be presented. The survey will show that factors involving the natures of verbs and those of nouns are important in studying aspect. Finally, in section 3 an attempt will be made to redefine Garey's concepts, using the case frame features in the form of redundancy rules.