Telicity

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According to Garey who introduced this term, telic verbs are verbs expressing an action tending towards a goal envisaged as realized in a perfective tense, but as contingent in an imperfective tense; atelic verbs, on the other hand, are verbs which do not involve any goal nor endpoint in their semantic structure, but denote actions that are realized as soon as they begin. (Garey, Howard B. 1957. Verbal aspects in French. Language 33:91–110.)

Some authors have changed the meaning of the notion of telicity recently.

Telicity as an aspect

Telicity or telic aspect has been reading as a grammatical aspect lately, indicating a reached goal or action completed as intended. Languages that contrast telic and atelic actions are Pirahã and Finnic languages such as Finnish and Estonian; Czech also has a perfective suffix pre-, which is additionally telic.

In Finnish, the telicity is marked on the object: the accusative is telic, and the partitive is used to express atelicity. It should be noted that the terms telic and atelic are not traditionally used in Finnish grammatical description; instead, it is customary to speak of resultitive and irresultative sentences.

An example of the contrast between resultative and irresultative in Finnish:

Kirjoitin artikkelin. wrote-1sg article-accusative "I wrote the article (and finished it)"
Kirjoitin artikkelia. wrote-1sg article-partitive "I wrote/was writing the article (but did not finish it)"

What is interpreted as the goal or result is determined by the context, e.g.

Ammuin karhun -- "I shot the bear (succeeded)"; i.e., "I shot the bear dead". ← implicit purpose
Ammuin karhua -- "I shot (towards) the bear"; i.e., "I shot at the bear (but it did not die)".

There are many verbs that correspond to only one telicity due to their inherent meaning. The partitive verbs are the same as atelic verbs in Garey's definition, that is, the action normally does not have a result or goal, and it would be logically and grammatically incorrect to place them in the telic aspect. However, even inherently atelic verbs such as rakastaa "to love" can in semantically unusual constructions, where a kind of result is involved, become telic:

Hän rakastaa minua. (s)he love-3sg me-partitive "(s)he loves me"
Hän rakastaa minut kuoliaaksi. (s)he love-3sg me-accusative dead-translative "(s)he loves me to death"

Furthermore, the telicity contrast can act as case government, so that changing the case can change the meaning entirely. For example, näin hänet (I saw him-acc) means "I saw him", but näin häntä (I saw him-part) means "I met him". This is often highly irregular.

Often telicity is superficially similar to the perfective aspect, and one can find descriptions such as "roughly perfective/imperfective". However, lexical pairs of perfective and imperfective verbs are found in Finnish, and this contrast can be superimposed with the telicity contrast.

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