Grammaticalized aspect and spatio-temporal culmination

In many languages, including English, sentences with agentive manner-of-motion verbs (e.g. Bill swam (for hours)) may come to denote telic eventualities through the addition of PP complements marking goals or sometimes result-locations (e.g. Bill swam to the island (in five minutes), John ran in the house (at noon)). We show that the absence of such ‘unaccusativization’ processes in many other languages, including Greek, correlates systematically with the presence of a grammaticalized aspectual opposition, and explain why this is so.Thus, even though ancient Greek uses goal PPs with such verbs, these retain an activity meaning and the PPs function as adjuncts, specifying the relevant manner of motion as directed to an end-point (an effect normally obtained in English only with periphrases, e.g. Sarah went walking/on a walk - to town (*in five minutes)). The loss of this option in modern Greek is explained by the loss of unambiguously goal-marking Ps.Our approach therefore recognizes two distinct phenomena, linking the absence of true unaccusativization systematically with the grammaticalization of aspect, and the absence of goal readings for PP adjuncts with the accidental loss of goal-marking Ps.