Events and telicity in classifier predicates: A reanalysis of body part classifier predicates in ASL

This paper is an extension of the analysis of classifier predicates (CL predicates) in ASL in Benedicto and Brentari (2004) in order to account for event structure as well as argument structure, motivated by the specific claim that limb/body part classifiers (BPCL) are unergative predicates with single external arguments. If unergative, with a single external argument, BPCL should not be able to express telic events (events containing natural semantic endpoints) because such events require a quantified or specified (delimited) internal argument, or some entity the event can apply to exhaustively. We show that BPCL can express telic as well as atelic events, indicating a contradiction with their claim that BPCL are unergative. We argue that BPCL do in fact contain internal arguments, realized as a morphemic specification for selected lingers in the handshape of the CL predicate that B&B associate in handling (HCL) and whole entity (w/e CL) CL with an internal argument, although this does not entail telicity. This evidence indicates that BPCL are in fact transitive, as are HCL, with the internal argument representing a body part of the referent external argument. We adopt a sub-event analysis of event structure (Pustejovsky, 1991, 1995) and following the claims of the Event Visibility Hypothesis for ASL (Wilbur, 2004a,b,c, 2005, in press; Schalber, 2004) demonstrate that telic and atelic events in ASL are morphologically and phonologically contrastive, in both CL and non-CL predicates, with the endpoints of telic events overtly marked morphologically. We demonstrate that telic BPCL also show these markings, supporting the claim that these CL predicates are transitive and not unergative. We adapt the syntactic analysis of Benedicto and Brentari to account for telicity following insights from Ramchand (in preparation) and Borer (2005). In addition, we show why the tests provided by Benedicto and Brentari to indicate the presence of an internal argument are not applicable for BPCL. Extensions of this analysis to non-CL predicates and instrument CL (ICL) are also discussed. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.