Traditionally, Vendlerian achievements (such as arrive, recognize) were regarded as unacceptable in the progressive, with occasional acceptable examples (Dowty, 1979, p. 137), whereby, unsurprisingly, progressive achievements came to be generally treated as a case of coercion into an accomplishment (Rothstein, 2004) or an activity (Moens and Steedman, 1988), or simply as individual cases of lexicalization (Piñón, 1997). All of these analyses in their present form, however, fail to explain why some but not all achievements can appear in the progressive, and/or why a particular achievement does or does not do so. In addition, different interpretations of the progressive (such as the most typical usage broadly synonymous with an about to meaning, versus a slow motion interpretation) are often not set apart in these accounts consistently. I propose that it is instead expedient to exploit the characteristics of the scale of change associated with an eventuality (cf. e.g., Beavers, 2011), and analyse progressive achievements as a case of scale coercion rather than aspectual class coercion. In particular, the core assumption is that the scale of change associated with an achievement in the progressive is coerced from a binary scale into a multi-valued scale. I suggest that this way it is possible to systematically differentiate the interpretations available for different progressive achievements, and to offer an account of different types of achievement.
References:
Beavers, J. (2011). Aspectual classes and scales of change. To appear in Linguistics.
Dowty, D. R. (1979). Word Meaning and Montague Grammar. Dordrecht: D. Reidel.
Moens, M. and M. Steedman (1988). Temporal ontology and temporal reference. Computational Linguistics 14(2), 1528.
Piñón, C. (1997). Achievements in an event semantics. In Proceedings of SALT VII, pp. 273296.
Rothstein, S. D. (2004). Structuring events: A study in the semantics of lexical aspect. Wiley-Blackwell.