Non-maximal telicity in English incremental theme predicates

Abstract

Typically, incremental theme predicates give rise to telicity inferences in the case when the object is quantized and an incremental mapping holds between the object and the verb. Culmination inferences can have a strange characteristic, where their default maximal meaning can be rejected in favour of a non-maximal construal. In this paper, I will present an empirical pattern for English incremental theme predicates, situate them within the broader typology of partitive accomplishments, before providing an analysis of their context-sensitive compositional properties and the source of their defeasible maximality.