Contributions to the analysis of activity verbs and telicity marking in English and Hungarian

The aim of the paper is to give a brief analysis of activity verb predicates in English and to show various mechanisms of encoding telicity of these predicates in English and Hungarian. Two major mechanisms of encoding telicity in these languages are either marking an object as countable, i.e., a quantized object, or utilizing a specific particle (also recognized as “coverb” in Hungarian) on the verbal form. English predominantly uses the first mechanism, while Hungarian mostly utilizes the second. The class of activity predicates is the most ‘productive’ of all the event types revealed in the literature in the sense of accepting telicizing particles.