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Anglophonia French Journal of English Linguistics 22 | 2016 Construction du sen

Anglophonia French Journal of English Linguistics 22 | 2016 Construction du sens Aspectual Verbs: a study of cease and continue GENEVIÈVE GIRARD-GILLET https://doi.org/10.4000/anglophonia.1036 Abstracts FrançaisEnglish Les verbes aspectuels « cease » et « continue » présentent la particularité d’être complémentés par une infinitive ou une gérondive, mais ils ne peuvent pas être comparés à « stop » et « carry on », qui n’acceptent qu’une gérondive dans le sens de cesser de faire quelque chose ou de continuer à faire quelque chose. L’infinitive, qui complémente « cease » n’a pas un sens de but, mais, exprime, au contraire, la fin d’un procès. L’infinitive après « continue » ne signifie pas qu’un procès s’est arrêté, puis a repris, mais qu’il n’y a eu aucune interruption de ce procès. Les interprétations de ces constructions nécessitent donc une analyse des paramètres qui conduisent au sens qu’elles mettent en place. L’opposition to+V et V-ing ne joue pas le même rôle que celui qu’elle joue avec d’autres verbes. À partir de multiples exemples en contexte, nous montrerons que l’interprétation dépend du sémantisme du verbe recteur, qui est plus complexe que communément admis, du rôle que joue le référent du sujet et de la manière dont l’énonciateur conceptualise l’événement. Cet article propose un approfondissement d’hypothèses antérieurement formulées, en prenant en considération la question du type de causation à l’oeuvre. Two aspectual verbs, “cease” and “continue” do not conform to the usual opposition that exists between an infinitival complement and a gerund clause, and thus cannot be compared with “stop” or “carry on”. Unlike what happens with “stop”, the infinitive after “cease” does not express a goal, but, on the contrary, the cessation of the process that was developing. The infinitive after “continue” does not mean that a process was resumed after its cessation, but that there was no cessation at all. These differences call for an analysis of the parameters that construe the diverging interpretations. The to+V and V-ing opposition does not play the same role it does with other verbs. Drawing on examples in context, we will show that the interpretation depends on the semantic features of the main verb, which is more complex than usually acknowledged, on the role played by the referent of the subject and on the way the speaker conceptualizes the All OpenEdition This site uses cookies and collects personal data. For further information, please read our Privacy Policy (updated on June 25, 2018). By continuing to browse this website, you accept the use of cookies. Close Page 1 of 25 Aspectual Verbs: a study of cease and continue 2020-11-23 https://journals.openedition.org/anglophonia/1036 event. This paper builds and enlarges on earlier works, by taking into account what type of causation is implied. Index terms Mots-clés: verbes aspectuels, agentivité, rôles thématiques, causation Keywords: aspectuals verbs, agentivity, thematic roles, causation Author's notes I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers of my paper for their extensive comments and rich suggestions. Full text Introduction The construction of aspectual verbs has puzzled linguists for years and in particular since Perlmutter’s seminal analysis in 1970. One verb seems to refuse all suggested explanations as it does not behave as is expected from its semantic features. It is the verb cease, which, unlike stop, can be followed by either an infinitive or a gerundive, in order to denote the end of a process. If I say John stopped to talk to his father I mean that he stopped doing what he was doing in order to talk to his father. The infinitival clause, to talk to his father, is a purpose clause, and a pause is possible before to, namely between stopped and to, in the oral production. On the contrary, with John ceased to talk, it is the end of the talking event that is expressed, and, in this sentence, no pause can occur between ceased and to talk.1 1 Duffley (2007: 61) remarks that cease is an exception among verbs denoting the termination of an event in being preferentially construed with to plus infinitive, in approximately 90% of its uses. The verb continue is as intriguing, as it can also be followed by an infinitival clause or a gerund to encode the continuation of a process. Utterer-based approaches focusing on the role of to as opposed to V-ing do not seem to have clearly explained why, in the linear order, the infinitive following stop construes the beginning of an intended process, while the infinitive following cease construes the end of an existing process. Deschamps (2014: 65, 70) considers that the interpretations of the alternations between V-ing and to + V for begin, start, commence, continue, cease are semantically very close to each other, and that it is only the opposition between the two constructions that explains the semantic differences2. This is indeed the case, but the opposition does not play the same semantic role, as the latter depends on whether it is stop or cease which is the main verb. The two constructions do differ widely, and this is the issue we wish to address here. The analysis builds and elaborates on two earlier works (Girard 1999, 2008). 2 After briefly summing up some parameters in already existing analyses, we shall try, in the second and the third part, to show that the two constructions correspond to two different meanings, or at least that there are tendencies explaining that the two types of construction are not interchangeable. In other words, it will be suggested that the properties of the constructions are explained by appeal to semantic notions, distinguishing between Agentive 3 This site uses cookies and collects personal data. For further information, please read our Privacy Policy (updated on June 25, 2018). By continuing to browse this website, you accept the use of cookies. Close Page 2 of 25 Aspectual Verbs: a study of cease and continue 2020-11-23 https://journals.openedition.org/anglophonia/1036 1. Some previous approaches a) there began to be a commotion (1970: 108) b) I tried to begin to work (1970: 111) [i]n general the to V form of a sentencial complement, whether occurring with start, begin, continue or cease, carries with it a generic reading. Once again a generic reading of an event suggests a repetition (or a series) of the event in question, occurring at different moments throughout an unspecified stretch of time. The V-ing form, on the other hand, has a durative reading, which here refers to the unspecified duration of a single event. subjects and non-Agentive ones, and to the way the events are conceptualized by the speaker. Wierzbicka noted (1988: 81) that with he stopped breathing, the process is generally thought of as intentional, whereas, the process is probably not intentional with he ceased to breathe. A comparison in the fourth part with nominal arguments raises the question of whether these verbs are transitive or intransitive, a point which could shed some light on the reasons why there is an opposition between infinitive constructions and gerundive ones. Since Perlmutter (1970), it has been assumed that aspectual verbs in English can be considered as raising and as control predicates. In comparing a) and b): 4 Perlmutter noted that in a) begin is a raising verb, whereas in b) begin is a control verb, with a thematic subject.3 Another argument for the control hypothesis is that begin is compatible with the imperative, as in: begin to work (1970: 113). In this syntactic approach the distinction that exists between infinitival complements and gerundives does not seem to be taken into consideration, or at least is not assumed to be an important factor, as far as the interpretation of the event is concerned. 5 Analyses focusing more on the semantic data have some difficulty explaining how the two constructions differ, as they look for a general explanation of all to-constructions as opposed to all V-ing constructions. Freed (1979: 152), for instance, suggests that: 6 When focusing more on the opposition between stop and cease Freed claims that cease expresses the definitive termination of an event (1979: 121)4, as opposed to stop. She explains that “cease from latin cessare via French cesser, became common in expressions such as cease to exist. This sense of cease will be of interest when we compare the definitive quality of cease with the more temporary nature of stop.” She posits (p. 108) that “what distinguishes one form from the other is the nature of the cessation -whether or not the cessation is intentional, and whether it is definitive as opposed to being merely an interruption of the event.” She also notes that the “to construction” is found to occur more comfortably with states than states can occur with many aspectualizers (p. 122), and this is confirmed by corpora-based studies, and in particular Egan’s (2008). 7 To avoid the paradox with stop, Egan treats the to construction with cease as a General Construction, following Freed (1979: 152) and Langacker (1987), and not as a backward-looking construction, even if he acknowledges that “it seems very much like a Backward-looking construction”(p. 105). 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