[from the “Linguist List”:http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-286.html]
bq. Zeno Vendler died of kidney failure on January 13, 2004, while on an extended stay with family in Hungary. He was 82, and had retired earlier from UCSD. He also taught at Cornell, Brooklyn College, and the University of Calgary, where he was a founding member of the philosophy department.”
Vendler is well-known among linguists, most notably through two early works: “Each and every, any and all,” and “verbs and times.” The first is an analysis of subtle differences among four English words that correspond to universal quantifiers in logic. The second concerns the often subtle effects of verb expressions on aspectual interpretation of sentences; the two terms Vendler introduced in the discussion of this topic area; “achievement” and “accomplishment,” have since become basic technical vocabulary in modern linguistics. Both of these works have been extremely influential and have served as sources for the later development of sophisticated and highly technical treatments of their respective topic areas. It may also be noted that Vendler’s work on the order of prenominal modifiers provides a precursor to theories of parsing.
See also the “obituary at the Calgary philosophy website”:http://www.phil.ucalgary.ca/people/vendler.html.
Vendler and Verbs
I noticed on The Linguist List recently that philosopher, linguist, and possessor of a really cool name Zeno Vendler recently died. I’ve been planning to do some more educational posts like Semantic Compositions, so I’ll dig out my old textbook…
January 27th, 2004, at 6:18 pm #