On Verb Semantics and the Syntactic Structure of Resultative Constructions
Hirohito Kanazawa
March 2010 

The English resultative construction has been a hottest topic of research on the syntax-semantics interface. Among a number of empirical problems surrounding this construction, one problem which attracts many researchers’ attention is that it can take an unselected direct object, like the pavement in (1a), licensed only under this construction: (1) a. The joggers ran the pavement thin. b. *The joggers ran the pavement. [Kaga (2007a: 79)] Interestingly, such unselected objects are not cross-linguistically acceptable. Compare English resultative sentence (2a) and its Japanese counterpart (2b): (2) a. He walked his legs off. b.??Kare-ga asi- o boo-ni arui-ta. he-Nom leg-Acc stiff walk-Past [Kaga (2007a: 78)] This paper attempts to account for the following questions: (a) How is an unselected object introduced into resultative constructions in English? and (b) How can such a contrastive behaviour of resultatives across languages be explained? We show that it is necessary to look into lexical properties of the predicate verbs, as well as the syntactic structure that underlies this construction.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/007991 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Tsukuba Review of English Language Teaching No.31 pp.99-122
keywords:	resultatives, inherent resultatives, semi-inherent resultatives, derived resultatives, verb semantics, thematic structure, cross-linguistic variation, semantics, syntax
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