Stative by construction

Fundamental to narrative is the ability to indicate what events overlapped what other events. Crucial to this ability is stativization: only stative situations can include (as opposed to being included within) reference time. But how exactly are stative type-shifts effected, and what does it mean for an event to be ‘turned into ’ a state? There are two purported paths to stativity: use of a compositional type-shifting device (1), and coercion, the creation of resolvable semantic conflict between a combinatoric pattern and an open-class word (2): (1) The House is voting on the legislation. (2) We talk on the phone every Sunday. What is the trigger for stative coercion in (2)? According to De Swart (1998, 2003) and others, it is the iterative adverbial every Saturday. But iteration is insufficient to secure stativity, as, e.g., activity verbs, which also consist of repeated actions, denote events rather than states. The stativity of progressive sentences is likewise mysterious under the standard analysis: while the progressive is typically said to select a medial portion from an event representation (Parsons 1990, Langacker 1987, Smith 1991), that portion is presumably an activity rather than a state. To resolve these paradoxes, I propose a selection-based model of stative type-shifts (both compositional and coerced). According to this model, stativizing constructions not only denote states but also select states in the Aktionsart representations of verbs with which they combine. By viewing stative type-shifts as the products of construction-verb unification, we can explain: (1) the relationship between a verb's input and output representations, (2) how tenses permute Aktionsart representations, and (3) the functions of the so-called relative past-tense.