An unwell person gets better (an accomplishment)

Phase of healing or taking medicine (an activity)

Transition from ill to well (an achievement)

Immediately the person is in good health (a state)

accomplishment

activity

achievement

state

(4.9)

a. He joined the band. (achievement)

b. He was a memeber of the band (state)

c. I talked to him about it (activity)

d. I got him to join the band (accomplishment)

If 4.9a is true, that must be 4.9b does too. (As long as “he” and “the band” related to the same noun)

The goal of 4.9d is to get 4.9a, that must be through 4.9c first.

If you applied the test of Table 4.3 to the sentences in

(4.9), there are three possibility happen:

Joining this particular band may be a drawn-out process. You do not just get accepted the first time you

turn up for a practice. Instead there are auditions, forms to fill in and committee approval to

be obtained.

He was joining the band at the beginning of every semester and dropping out after a couple of weeks.

Extended in this way (4.9a) has an interpretation called habitual, which could alternatively be expressed

with used to: He used to join the band at the beginning of every semester …

In certain circumstances we can use progressive aspect to talk about the future, notably when something is scheduled, for example The timetable says there’s

another bus arriving in an hour.

The point of this discussion is that doing semantics calls for careful thought. Asking why a test seems to fail can lead to deeper understanding and a better

specification of the conditions under which the test does work.

As well as being an accomplishment, the sentence in (4.9d) is a causative on the pattern of those in Table 4.1. I regard causative sentences as a subspecies of

accomplishments. It is not possible to pursue the issuehere, but it appears that all the causatives in Tables 4.1

and 4.2 fit the criteria for accomplishments given in Table 4.3.