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Share Paper 3754

Culmination Entailments in V and P: Evidence from White Hmong
William Johnston
262-269 (complete paper or proceedings contents)

Abstract

Recent analyses of (non-)culmination in V and (un-)boundedness in P have arrived at a similar intuition: that the denotation of the event/path predicate includes both culminating and non-culminating events/paths, which are unified by a modal relationship to a particular goal. This paper presents novel data in support of these analyses from White Hmong (Hmong-Mien), a language in which the conceptual parallels between these two domains give rise to parallel surface-level phenomena. In Hmong, both Accomplishment verbs and Goal prepositions are non-culminating by default, and culmination entailments can be derived in both domains by secondary predication. I offer a unified formal analysis of this behavior, argue in favor of the prepositional status of Hmong directed motion predicates, and discuss implications for the study of (non-)culmination cross-linguistically.

Published in

Proceedings of the 41st West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
edited by Nikolas Webster, Yağmur Kiper, Richard Wang, and Sichen Larry Lyu
Table of contents
Printed edition: $545.00