Causative-Inchoative Entailment and the Logical Structure of Accomplishments in Kumyk

This squib explores semantic characteristics of accomplishment predicates in Kumyk (Altaic, Turkic) that do not entail the existence of a result state in the evaluation world. We propose that the subclass of such accomplishments known as defeasible causatives involve a more complex event structure than is commonly assumed and consists of the three causally connected components: an agent's activity, a change of state, and a causing eventuality that appears in between the former two in the event structure. The partitive relation responsible for the lack of culmination entailments connects the intermediate cause and the result state, but does not involve the agent's activity. This accounts for the ability of defeasible causatives to build up a telic description without the result state being part of the evaluation world. These results can be of significance for processing systems for Turkic languages that should capture inferences valid in the logical structure of natural language.