Cognitive Mechanisms Underlying Fake Reflexive Resultatives

Abstract

Both projectionist and constructional approaches to language support competing arguments as regards the place where grammar meets the lexicon. While the former claim that the morphosyntactic realization of verbal arguments is determined by the lexical semantic representation of the verb, the latter hold that lexicon and grammar form a continuum and put forward a shift of emphasis from the pivotal role of the verb within the sentence to the notion of construction as a form/meaning or function pairing. Moreover, constructionists stipulate that lexical–constructional fusion is regulated by some constraints (e.g. Goldberg’s semantic constraints or Michaelis’ Override Principle). We provide further evidence in favour of the constructional approach through the analysis of the fake reflexive resultative construction. We concur with Goldberg and Levin that semantically similar verbs tend to participate in the same argument structure constructions. To systematize our analysis, we take as a basis Levin’s classification of verbs and their distribution across Halliday and Matthiessen’s process types. Additionally, we make a contribution to the literature on constraints on lexical–constructional fusion by discussing some cognitive mechanisms, mainly high-level metaphor and metonymy, which license or block out this process.