| Grammatical features |
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Syntax relationships |
Inlinguistics,boundedness is asemantic feature that relates to an understanding of the referential limits of alexical item.[1] Fundamentally, words that specify a spatio-temporal demarcation of their reference are consideredbounded, while words that allow for a fluidly interpretablereferent are consideredunbounded. This distinction also relies on the divisibility of the lexical item's referent into distinct segments, or strata.[2] Though this feature most often distinguishescountability innouns andaspect inverbs, it applies more generally to any syntactic category.
For verbs, certaingrammatical aspects express boundedness.
Boundedness is characteristic ofperfective aspects such as theAncient Greekaorist and theSpanishpreterite. Thesimple past of English commonly expresses a bounded event ("I found out"), but sometimes expresses, for example, astative ("I knew").
The perfective aspect often includes a contextual variation similar to aninchoative aspect orverb, and expresses the beginning of astate.
InGerman, the modal particle "mal" can be used to express that the speaker renounces the exactness and temporal unambiguity of the action of the verb, favoring vagueness and non-commitment.[3]
In order for a noun to be semanticallybounded, its referent item, whether tangible or abstract, must have clearly defined limits on the extent and content of what it encompasses. Structurally,bounded andunbounded nouns correlate to a number of descriptive criteria. The first criterion isinternal homogeneity; while the referent ofbounded nouns can be composed of distinct segments, anunbounded noun typically refers to something which is considered a cohesive expanse. The next criteria are the interrelated concepts ofexpansibility andreplicability. Becauseunbounded nouns refer tointernally homogeneous referents, any part of their expansive referent could be analyzed as an instance of that noun. Further, any removal of the expanse does not change the applicability of the noun to its referent. These two qualities are not possible ofbounded nouns.[1]
Note that boundedness in nouns should not be thought of as synonymous with countability. Rather, boundedness is an underlying semantic distinction that motivates countability.