In this paper an attempt will be made to describe the Aktionsarts of German prefix verbs and their relationship with the event structures denoted by event predicates. Most German prefix verbs have either inchoative or resultative Aktionsart, and that ...
In this paper an attempt will be made to describe the Aktionsarts of German prefix verbs and their relationship with the event structures denoted by event predicates. Most German prefix verbs have either inchoative or resultative Aktionsart, and that they belong to the event predicates which denote changes in the state of affairs. Intuitively these changes are interval based. However, they cannot be fixed and visualized by any means such as tense and aspect on the syntactic level. It was also discovered that most of inchoative and resultative verbs cannot co-occur with durative or time span adverbials and do not undergo the syntactic test such as 'unperso¨nliches passive' or 'Mittelkonstrukton,' whereas durative verbs are very often unmarked to that kind of syntactic tests. This means that the inchoative and the resultative verbs apparently have nothing to do with the interval for their process or action. This would be certainly against our intuition. Through the various syntactic methods such as state passive, attributive adjective derivation, and paraphrase relationship with 'Hilfsverb beginnen and aufho¨ren,' one can confirm the interval for their process or action indirectly. The semantic approach of describing the events denoted by German prefix verbs has brought very important consequences: the event structure denoted by inchoative and resultative verbs is composed of the source state, the target state, and the intervening change between them. Thus the source state and the target state should not stand in a contradictory relationship because of the intervening intervals. As the intervals cannot be visualized on the syntactic level, the change from the source state to the target state seems to happen punctually. This invisible interval can be captured on the lexical level as suggested by word formation rules in Shin (1998a).