Telicity is two-fold: evidence from verbal prefixes and internal arguments in Lithuanian

This paper investigates inner-aspectual prefixes and their relation to internal arguments in Lithuanian (Baltic). I argue that telicity is not a unified phenomenon, in fact, there are two structural ingredients to it. The argument is from the fact that internal arguments have different properties in transitive constructions in Lithuanian, and these properties correlate with the choice of the functional item (verbal prefix) that marks telicity. Building on observations about the interpretation of the object argument and its morphological marking, I argue that even in verbal-prefixing languages, certain constructions conform to Verkuyl's generalization. I emphasize that Lithuanian has two types of prefixed constructions: one exhibits Verkuylian effects, and the other does not. This supports the view that variation is restricted to functional items available in the language (Borer 1984). I argue that empirical observations on the internal argument's scope-taking, D-linking and kind/object-reference suggest that the nominal argument and the prefix are doing separate things in telicity-building, and two steps are involved in what has hitherto been subsumed by the single notion of telicity (in line with Borer 2023).