On the aspectual interpretation of the temporal meaning of the adverbial accusative in Old English: telicity and granularity

Nakanishi Shimon

doi:10.14989/287574

This paper reexamines the temporal meaning of the adverbial accusative in Old English from an aspectual perspective and points out that, although the accusative is traditionally considered to denote duration of time, there are examples that fail to demonstrate durative connotation. Therefore, in order to deal with the difficulty of judging temporal meaning, this study proposes to describe it by combining semantic features of the verb, noun and the adjective in a sentence. Temporal meanings of the Old English adverbial cases were described as durative, punctual, or iterative in the previous literature. However, no clear criterion of distinction is indicated, nor is there any discussion as to whether this categorialization is legitimate or sufficient. There are also cases where the same sentence is interpreted differently among various scholars. Therefore, this paper bases the discussion on the aspectual theory according to which objectively the same length of time can be construed differently depending on the granularity of the temporal interpretation and maintains that the clearcut distinction of temporal meanings, especially in dead languages, is impossible. Hence, to describe those in Old English as objectively as possible, it is required to resort to the combination of features of the linguistic elements involved in the sentence.

On the aspectual interpretation of the temporal meaning of the adverbial accusative in Old English: telicity and granularity

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