On the Compositional Nature of States

“I have always treated statives as belonging to the aspectual ‘garbage can’ alongside other forms of aspectual durativity by considering them as primitives. Husband belies this claim showing convincingly that there is real gold in that can: statives turn out to be as compositional as terminative constructions. By doing this he opens a beautiful domain of research. The best way for me to express this is perhaps by exclaiming: “Why the hell didn't I see that myself, stupid?” It is really fascinating and joyful to see what Husband has digged up.”

“In the past few decades, meticulous semantic and syntactic research has greatly contributed to our understanding of event structure. However, more often not, the focus of that research has been the properties of eventive rather than stative eventualities. Matthew Husband's book is an important contribution to the closing of this gap. Taking as its starting point, on the one hand, the distinction between individual level predicates and stage level predicates, and on the other hand, the results of research into the syntax and semantics of eventive eventualities and in particular the quantization approach to telicity, Husband's model integrates into an intriguing whole notions such as telicity and quantization, scalarity, and voice, to give rise to an insightful and thought provoking work that is sure to become a cornerstone in our understanding of event structure in general, and the eventive/stative dividing line in particular. A must-read for any scholar who is interested in the impact which the syntax-semantic interface has had on the study of events and their properties.”