Parameterizing culmination: Lexical sources, event structure, and implicatures in incremental-theme predicates

Abstract

Telic incremental-theme predicates in Mandarin systematically allow incomplete interpretations, in contrast to their English counterparts. This paper argues that this contrast reflects differences in the lexical encoding of culmination. I propose that Mandarin incremental-theme verbs encode a part-of operator, which introduces minimal distributive affectedness. The familiar incompletion flavor arises through scalar implicature, triggered by lexical competition between bare predicates and their stronger alternatives. Under this analysis, culmination is not reducible to telicity but constitutes an independent dimension of event realization. The proposal motivates a typological perspective in which languages vary in where culmination is encoded and in how it interacts with telicity in the grammar.