completedaction

Completedaction is a term used in linguistics and semantics to describe an action that has reached its completion, yielding a discrete end state or result. In this sense, a completedaction corresponds to events with a defined culmination, often analyzed as having perfective or telic characteristics, where the event has a clear endpoint within a given temporal frame.

In theory of aspect, completedaction is closely tied to the notion of telicity—the idea that some actions are inherently bounded and produce a resulting state. Languages commonly encode completedactions through perfective aspect, resultative constructions, or specific verbal stems that signal completion. By contrast, ongoing or habitual actions are typically associated with imperfective readings, which do not entail a completed endpoint.

Formal semantics treats completedaction as an event with a culmination time that lies within the reference interval. This means there exists an endpoint at which the event is fully realized, and the state resulting from the action holds after that endpoint. In cross-linguistic data, markers such as the Russian perfective, Spanish preterite, Turkish perfective suffixes, or Chinese le (了) often align with completedactions, though the exact realization varies by language.

Examples help illustrate the distinction. English: “I finished the report” signals a completedaction; “I am finishing the report” signals an ongoing, non-completed action. In languages with explicit aspect marking, a completedaction may be encoded without a direct English equivalent, relying on verb morphology or auxiliary structures to signal culmination.

Note that completedaction is not a universally standard label in all grammars; it is one way to describe the semantic and syntactic properties of completed events. Related concepts include perfective aspect, telicity, and event semantics.

See also: perfective aspect, imperfective aspect, telicity, event semantics, culmination.