Aspectual Semantics of the German Preterit Based on Telic and Atelic Verbs

This paper aims to account for divergences in degrees of acceptability of sentences with co-occurring telic verbs and atelic durative time span adverbials. While German lacks a morphologically grammaticalized aspect category comparable to that of the Slavic languages, aspectual meanings are nevertheless actively expressed at the semantic level. From this point of view, even though the main function described for the preterit form is that of indicating past temporal reference, its functional scope has been shown to exceed purely temporal meaning. My research investigates the interaction of tense and aspect, specifically how the context determined by these abstract properties contributes to the semantic interpretation of the preterit as a whole; in particular, how it is modulated by lexical and actional properties of verbs. In particular, we pay special attention to the telic/atelic distinction and the criteria for determining telicity. It stems from a lexical-semantic and actional classification of verbs in the preterit form. The findings show that the aspectual interpretation of the preterit is not driven on grammatical form alone but rather, being sensitive to the verb’s inherent actional properties. Consequently, the German preterit constitutes a sophisticated tense-aspect marker whose realizational semantics is context- and lexicon-dependent.