Title: Culmination Entailments in Hmong
Abstract: White Hmong is a “non-culminating accomplishment” language: that is, accomplishment predicates (in the unmarked case) do not convey that their goal or telos is successfully reached. For example, peb ua lub tsev (‘we built a house’) does not entail that the building of the house was carried through to completion. Culmination entailments can, however, be derived in Hmong. In this talk, I explore the available strategies for deriving culmination in Hmong, which include resultative secondary predication, inner aspect marking, and actuality-entailing modals. These three strategies can all be instantiated by a single polysemous lexical item tau (‘acquire’, ‘be.able.to’), and their shared historical origin may inform syntactic and semantic analyses of their synchronic behavior.