Achievement Verbs and the Progressive Meanings

This paper deals with achievement verbs based on Vendler\u27s (1967) four categorizations of aspectual properties of verbs. It has been widely thought in the literature that achievement verbs express an event that occurs at a single moment as typically characterized as the featural opposition [+telic, -stages] in Rothstein (2004). I argue against this conventional analysis on achievement verbs and show that some subtypes of achievement verbs denote a durative event with a focus on the process of change. Furthermore, I discuss progressive forms of achievement verbs and point out the differences in meaning according to the subclasses of achievement verbs. My own claim is that the differences are attributed to the distinction between process-and goal-focusing verb types associated with telicity and focus-placement