object parts have proper functions. One might therefore consider occupation to be a special type of proper function,
relativized to humans and domestic animals.
I am inclined to see proper function as a basic element of human conceptualization (and here I fundamentally diverge
fro mMillikan's realist approach). It is not without significance that children are inclined to ascribe proper functions to
more things than adults do (Kelemen 1999), for exampleA lake is to swim in, The sun is to keep us warm. A lot of science
(including evolutionary theory) has been concerned with removing unwarranted teleology from our understanding of
the natural world; Skinner just went too far in trying to remove it from our understanding of behavior.
In sum, an entity's telic quale encodes actions in which the entity takes part, modulated by a modality such as
characteristic action, current action, characteristic function, and proper function. The telic quale is the locus for
forming the meaning of so-called agentive (-er) nominals (Aronoff 1980; Busa 1996). For instance,driverhas a telic
quale‘X drives’. If a person, it can denote a person who is currently driving or whose occupation is driving; if an
artifact, it denotes something whose proper function is driving (e.g. a golf club or a driving wheel on a locomotive).
A somewhat more complex relation appears in words likeviolinist. A violinist is someone whose activity(telic quale) is
playingtheviolin. But theactivity‘playing’is notovertlyspecified (as inviolin player). Rather itcomes from themeaning
ofviolin. A furtherexpansion yields‘personwhoseactivity is using a violin initsproper function(namelyplaying it).’In
addition, the playing of aviolinistcan be either an occupation(29a), a characteristicactivity(29b), or evenjust a current
activity (29c).
(29) a.Linda is a violinist in the symphony, but she hasn't played for months, since they've been on strike.
b. Jerome is an occasional violinist.
c. Oddly enough, none of the violinists in the orchestra tonight have ever played the violin before—that's why
they sound so bad.Words don't have to be derived morphologically in order to have this sort of complexity in their telic quale. For
instance,fuelis a substance whose proper function is to burn, this function in turn forming a part of the proper
function of something else. The something else can be made explicit in a variety of ways, for instancefuel for a rocket,
rocket fuel.
Pustejovsky motivatesqualiastructure byshowing thatitis necessary for understanding thedirectobjects ofverbslike
beginandenjoy. These verbs require an activity as their semantic argument: one beginsdoingthings and