On uncancelledness of events: a view from Mongolian

Abstract Once an event occurs, it can never be cancelled by its very nature. This paper, based on examination of the aspectual and modal properties of the completion marker -čih in Mongolian, shows that uncancelledness, a hitherto undocumented aspect of semantics, plays significant roles in aspectual and modal properties of verbs. It is argued that uncancelledness is an semantic primitive, which leads to the thorough completion of (the commencement of) events as well as a resultant state and causes modal effect by the virtue of the information available in the presupposition, say, contradiction.