In my previous thread Barque wrote that "She
built her house for five years" doesn't make sense because "She built" implies
a completed act.
But at the same time he wrote that "I
read a book for half an hour" and "My grandfather
learned English for only three months" are fine.
Why? Why "She built her house" is a completed act, but "I read the book" and "He learned English" are not?? Why we can't add duration to the 'built', but can to 'read' and 'learned'? What's the logic of the English language?
I disagree with the idea that "My grandfather learned English for only three months" is fine. Either the verb should be "studied," or "for" should be changed to "in":
My grandfather learned English in only three months. (= It only took him three months to learn English.)
My grandfather studied English for only three months. (Then he had had enough. He decided that he didn't want to study it any more.)
Notice that the meaning of each of those sentences is vastly different from that of the other.
As for "I read a book for half an hour," there are two different senses in which that can be interpreted, only one of which is aspectually cromulent. Reading a book can understood as an activity; that is the natural interpretation of "read a book" in that sentence. A lot of folks read the Bible every day, for example. That doesn't mean they read the entire Bible every day; it means they read
from the Bible every day. To read a book in this sense is essentially to read
from a book (but without jumping around). The other interpretation of reading a book is that it is an accomplishment, the complete act of reading a book from start to finish. It is on this unnatural interpretation that "I read a book for half an hour" would be aspectually odd-sounding. This oddity and unnaturalness can be obviated by adding "whole":
??? I read a whole book for half an hour.
*?! I read the whole Bible for half an hour.
While it might be possible for an extremely fast reader to read a very short book from start to finish many times continuously in a mere half hour, I do not think that there ever has been or ever will be a human being capable of reading so fast that he or she could read the entire Bible, Old Testament and New, many times consecutively in a mere half an hour. Now, if we changed the subject to a computer or smartphone, the sentence would be better, since is it conceivable that a computer could (without consciousness) mechanically scan the entire Bible for half an hour, say, to search for a collocation a grammarian was interested in.
Regarding "She built her house for five years," why can't that sentence have the type of activity reading available for "I read a book for half an hour"? I think it is because building a house involves bringing something that did not previously exist into existence. When we read a book, the book is already there. When we build a house, we go from not having a house to having a house. This going from not having a particular house to having that selfsame house cannot occur cyclically as an activity for any length of time, let alone for five whole years.
As you can see, the reasoning in these matters is quasi-metaphysical. Indeed, this grammatical phenomenon was first studied by philosophers. Arguably, it was Aristotle himself who noticed it first. But English didn't exist when he was around. More recently, the philosophers Gilbert Ryle, Anthony Kenny, and Zeno Vendler studied the phenomenon. In 1957, Vendler wrote a very famous little article called "Verbs and Times" in the journal
The Philosophical Review; he later published it as part of his book
Linguistics in Philosophy (1967). It has influenced linguists interested in "ontological aspect," including specialists in the English tense system, ever since.
Here's a link to the article on JSTOR.