Argument resultatives and adjunct resultatives in a lexical constructional account: the case of resultatives with adjectival result phrases

Abstract

In the literature, sentences like The river froze solid or The door swung open have often been cited as instances of resultatives, along with uncontroversial resultatives like He hammered the metal flat or The joggers ran the pavement thin. However, the former type (Type B resultatives) behave differently from the latter type (Type A resultatives) in several respects, so that the two types of resultatives need to be handled differently. Besides the fact that Type B resultatives cannot be appropriately paraphrased by means of either “X becomes Y by V-ing” or “X causes Y to become Z by V-ing”, (1) Type B resultatives do not obey the Unique Path Constraint [Goldberg, A., 1991. It can’t go up the chimney down: paths and the English resultative. In: Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, pp. 368–378; Goldberg, A., 1995. Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago]; (2) the result phrase cannot always be regarded as being predicated of its seeming host; (3) Type B resultatives may sometimes behave like verb particle combinations (e.g., He swung open the door). All these behavioral differences between Type A and Type B resultatives can be coherently accounted for once one identifies the distinction between the two types of resultatives as that between argument structure constructions and adjuncts. Besides showing that resultatives are not a monolithic category, the present paper has important implications for Goldberg’s (1995) constructional approach to resultatives. On the one hand, her constructional analysis is essentially correct, as far as argument resultatives go. On the other, in order to handle a wider range of empirical data, a constructional analysis should look beyond argument structure constructions.