Thus, it is doubtful that one can define telic expressions by means of properties of the events or states that they refer to (a very similar problem arises with the notion that mass nouns refer to things that can't be counted).
Thus, recent attempts at making the notion explicit focus on the way that telic expressions refer to, or present events or states.
This type of exercise can serve as a reminder of the futility of trying to link linguistic semantics to the real world without considering the intermediary agent of human cognition.
An expression 'P' can be said to be quantized if and only if it satisfies the following implication, for any choice of events x and y: Suppose, for example, that John built two houses.
Hence, build a house is correctly characterized as telic and walk around aimlessly as atelic by this definition.
Languages that contrast telic and atelic actions are Pirahã and Finnic languages such as Finnish and Estonian; Czech and Hungarian also have perfective prefixes pre- and meg-, respectively, which are additionally telic.
The terms telic and atelic are not traditionally used in Finnish grammatical description; instead, it is customary to speak of resultative and irresultative sentences.
(s)he love-3SG me-ACC dead-TRANSL"(s)he loves me to death"Also, many other stative verbs that are in terms of their meaning inherently atelic, mark their objects in the accusative case, which is the normal case for telic situations: Tiedänknow-1SGPekanPekka-GENosoitteen.address-ACCTiedän Pekan osoitteen.know-1SG Pekka-GEN address-ACC"I know Pekka's address" (not *Tiedän Pekan osoitetta ... address-PART)Muistanremember-1SGsinunyou-GENkasvosi.face-PL.ACC.2SG_POSSMuistan sinun kasvosi.remember-1SG you-GEN face-PL.ACC.2SG_POSS"I remember your face" (not *Muistan sinun kasvojasi ... face-PL.PART-2SG_POSS)Furthermore, the telicity contrast can act as case government, so that changing the case can change the meaning entirely.
The use of a telic object may implicitly communicate that the action takes place in the future.
For example, Often telicity is superficially similar to the perfective aspect, and one can find descriptions such as "roughly perfective–imperfective".