TELIČNOST U ENGLESKOM I RUMUNSKOM JEZIKU
Telicity in English and Romanian

Summary/Abstract: This paper analyses the concept of telicity and its influence on verbal aspect and Aktionsart in the English and the Romanian language. The semantic category of telicity may function as a basis for semantic classification of verbs and verb phrases into activities, states, achievements and accomplishments (Aktionsart). Based on the semantic characteristic of telicity, situations can be divided into telic and atelic, in both English and Romanian. The difference between these two types of situations is very significant for the study of verbal aspect and Aktionsart, since telicity is one of the basic semantic characteristics or distinctive features of verbs. Telic situations tend towards a specified goal, thus they have a natural endpoint, while atelic situations do not tend towards a goal and do not have an endpoint. Due to the fact that telicity only indicates the existence or absence of a goal, Declerck’s (1979) classification of situations into bounded and unbounded is also applied in this paper, since it indicates whether the goal was actually reached or not. The most important contribution of this paper is the fact that it identified and defined the semantic category of telicity in the Romanian language. We suggest that the semantic category of telicity replaces the Romanian distinctive feature [change], which has two different meanings, thus introduces ambiguities and confusion when analyzed. The analysis has revealed that we can distinguish situations which tend towards a goal, i.e. which imply a change of state of the situation, thus a telic/atelic distinction can be conceived in the Romanian language as well.This study of English and Romanian gives a better insight into the nature of telicity in both languages as well as an opportunity to establish parametric and systematic similarities and differences, giving a specific contribution to aspectology.

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