Resultative Constructions In English Research Articles

The Contrastive Analyses of Resultative Constructions in English and Chinese —Based on Washio’s Strong and Weak Resultative Divisions

Resultative constructions exist in many languages, such as English, Chinese, Japanese and French, etc., which makes contrastive studies on different resultative constructions become a hot topic in linguistics. In the paper, based on Washio’s strong and weak division, a sharp difference is focused on two types of Chinese resultative constructions through contrasting Chinese resultative constructions with English resultative ones, although there are some similarities between two types of Chinese resultative constructions, so as to let Chinese language learners deeply understand resultative constructions in Chinese.

Chinese EFL Learners’ Perception of English Resultative Constructions

This paper delves into some syntactic and semantic properties of English and Chinese resultative constructions and examines how Chinese EFL learners perceive English RCs via a survey among 32 Chinese college students. The subjects were asked to identify whether 14 RCs of seven different types are grammatical and translate them into Chinese. The findings of the survey reveal that they have difficulties in comprehending English RCs due to cross-linguistic differences between the two languages in terms of the resultative phrase, word order, direct object restriction, dynamic restriction, and animate instigator constraint. These differences are reflected on the seven RC types, which exhibit different accuracy rates in their highest order as follows: selected transitive RCs with AP (STRC-AP, 100%), unselected transitive RCs with PP (UTRC-PP, 100%), intransitive RCs with PP (IRC-PP, 100%), selected transitive RCs with AP (STRC-AP, 75%), unselected transitive RCs with AP (UTRC-AP, 68.75), fake reflexive RCs with AP (FRRC-AP, 45.3%), and intransitive RCs with AP (IRC-AP, 31.5%). We argue that the subjects’ errors in their grammatical judgment are triggered by their L1 transfer into their target language.

Um novo olhar sobre a improdutividade de construções resultativas no PB

ABSTRACT Typical resultative constructions in English are unavailable in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and in Romance. This fact has been attributed by previous studies to different event-framings, following the Talmian view. English would illustrate the satellite-framing pattern, whereas Romance would illustrate the verb-framing pattern. Literature in BP has mainly focused on describing properties of different sentences similar to resultatives of the English type. A large part of the debate has been devoted to answering whether these can be classified as true resultatives. Much less attention has been dedicated to a proper description of the framing patterns in BP. This paper fills in this gap and, by doing so, argues that BP admits both framing patterns. The v-framing pattern is highly productive, exemplified by numerous complex parasynthetic verbs that entail a result. The s-framing pattern is marginal, illustrated by a small sample of modified resultatives and verb-particle constructions. This paper supports the framing analysis, but recasts its merits in light of new connections established among (apparent) resultatives in BP.

Not all English Resultative Constructions (ERCs) are equal: The acquisition of ERC by Spanish speakers

ABSTRACT The English Resultative Construction (ERC) is a satellite-framed structure with no identical equivalent in Spanish. In a series of studies, we analyzed and compared recognition (acceptability judgment task) and comprehension (sentence comprehension task) of three ERC subtypes with the English Depictive Construction (EDC) (which has a Spanish counterpart) by Spanish speaker learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). Results showed that: 1) EDCs were better recognized than ERCs by L2 learners, but highly proficient participants were closer to English native speakers’ performance, 2) Less proficient EFLs comprehended EDCs better than those ERC subtypes that were further from Spanish (ERC Property and Fake Reflexive). We interpret our findings in terms of an interlinguistic distance gradient, where those constructions present (EDC) or closer (ERC-Path) to L1 are more readily acquired. This effect seems more prominent at lower EFL proficiencies, and fades as proficiency increases, evolving towards a more native-like pattern.

English and Japanese Resultatives Resultative Constructions vs. Lexical Resultatives

Linguistic expressions describing a situation where an action brings about a result are called resultative expressions or resultatives. Of resultatives, those based on construction are resultative constructions. English resultative constructions are considered a family extending from core cases to peripheral and idiomatic instances. On the other hand, contrary to ordinary opinions, the Japanese language lacks explicit resultative constructions. Its resultative expressions are limited to pseudo-resultatives and resultative verbal compounds. Resultative expressions can be of two types; those whose causal relation derives from construction and those whose causal relation derives from a word. English has these two resultatives, but Japanese has only the latter. In other words, when viewed from the origin of where the causal relationship represented by CAUSE comes from, resultatives can be divided into those whose CAUSE originates lexically and those whose CAUSE originates from the construction. English has both types, while Japanese has only the lexically originated causal relationship. This paper examines this issue in detail.

Strong and Weak Resultatives in Chinese Resultative Constructions

Washio (1997) contrasts resultative constructions in English and Japanese in terms of strong and weak resultatives and proposes that both strong and weak resultatives are allowed in English while only weak ones are acceptable in Japanese. When strong and weak resultatvies are examined in two types of Chinese resultative constructions: resultative V-A-(NP) compounds and V-DE-(NP)-A constructions, it can be found that both strong and weak resultatives are allowed in resultative V-A-(NP) compounds while only strong ones are acceptable in V-DE-(NP)-A constructions. Why so? It is related to the function of DE and this question can be explained in terms of the syntactic structures of strong and weak resultatives in Chinese based on Folli’s three-layer system.

Judgement of Telicity in English Resultative Constructions by Korean Learners of English

Judgement of Telicity in English Resultative Constructions by Korean Learners of English

Degree Resultatives as Second-Order Constructions

Resultatives in English and Dutch have developed special degree readings. These readings stem from a reinterpretation of the resultative predicate as indicating a high degree rather than an actual result. For example, when a parent saysI love youtodeath, one need not call the cops, since the sentence is not about love turning lethal, but merely indicative of a high degree of affection. Such cases have often been noted in the literature as idiomatic, but this view ignores the fact that these are not isolated cases but productive constructions that can be used with a variety of verbs. We explore various resultative constructions in English and Dutch, and give a classification of the subtypes involved as well as their diachronic development from ordinary to degree interpretation. We link these subtypes to lexical semantic classes of verbs. Both English and Dutch show a steady growth in the lexical and structural diversity of degree resultatives throughout the early modern and contemporary periods (1600-2000). We focus in our paper on the period 1800-2000, for which we did an extensive corpus study using the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and Delpher (a collection of digitized Dutch newspapers, journals, magazines, and other resources). One of our findings is that, similar to other types of expressive language, such as degree modification and emphatic negation, taboo expressions play a role in degree resultatives; in fact, their role is excessive. We outline a number of the commonalities among the semantic domains of expressive language used in resultatives.

Resultative constructions in English and Chinese

This paper investigates the interaction between verbal and constructional properties of the resultative constructions in English and Chinese. The choice of this structure brings out the important interface between syntax and semantics. The resultative in both English and Chinese is argued to be a construction larger than a single compound, and this is more controversial in Chinese because almost all linguists will treat the resultative such as da si ‘hit die’ as a compound. In particular, the construction is treated as subordination implied by the Deranking Hierarchy (Cristofaro, 2003) and a mini-construction in the sense of Construction Grammar (Goldberg, 1995; Boas, 2004). Simultaneously, the resultative is taken to be a highly transitive structure (Hopper and Thompson, 1980; Cheng and Huang, 1994). Finally, we will argue along Fauconnier’s (1997: 173) observation that ‘grammatical constructions are blends, which are entrenched but evolve diachronically’, which seems to be the case of the resultative construction in Chinese.

A Usage-based Analysis of L2 Production of English Resultative Constructions

A Usage-based Analysis of L2 Production of English Resultative Constructions

A Comparative Analysis of Resultative Constructions in English and Korean

A Comparative Analysis of Resultative Constructions in English and Korean

A Contrastive Study of Resultative Constructions in English, Japanese and Chinese

Researching on resultative constructions has become a hot topic in linguistic field in recent years, because it plays an important role in illuminating the nature of lexical semantics and its relationship with syntax. This paper simply contrasts resultative constructions in English, Japanese and Chinese from the perspectives of their syntactic structures and Washio’s (1997) semantic distinctions, that is, strong resultatives and weak resultatives. I mainly discuss their similarities and differences to deepen our understanding of resultative constructions among these three languages. This paper is organized as follows: section 1 simply introduces types of resultative constructions in English, Japanese and Chinese; section 2 introduces Washio's analysis of strong and weak resultatives; section 3 compares V-V compound resultatives in Japanese and Chinese to illustrate their differences; section 4 compares resultative constructions in three languages which are based on Washio’s (1997) semantic analysis to identify the differences on resultatives in these three languages and furtherly explain why Japanese has only weak resultatives, according to Washio’s analysis; section 5 is the conclusion of this paper.

러시아어 작문･번역 교육을 위한 러시아어-한국어 결과 구문 비교 연구

This paper deals with the properties of Russian and Korean resultative constructions in comparison with English resultative constructions. As the morphological and syntactic properties of resultative constructions vary from language to language, understanding properly the characteristics of the resultative constructions of any two languages is important in order to translate sentences accurately from one language into the other. The Russian language does not allow secondary predication in resultative constructions, which are possible in Korean and English. Instead a large class of Russian prefixed verbs, the circumfix verbs (prefixed reflexive verbs), have the same semantic structure as resultative constructions. In the case of the Korean language, since resultative constructions are closely related to the morphology, it has the bounded resultative morphemes ‘-게, -도록’ which can be used in different meanings besides the resultative. Specific translation methods of Korean and Russian resultative constructions according to the verb types are suggested for teaching purposes.

Towards a Hierarchy of Resultative Constructions: Theoretical and Empirical Issues

This paper investigates how linguistic theory can account for the acquisition of the so-called English resultative constructions. It examines the syntactic dichotomies that X-Bar theory poses in their argument structure and puts forward several proposals that give answer to Chomsky’s hypothesis (1981). In particular, it focuses on the ternary branching analysis and the small clause approach. Taking into account the syntactic properties of the resultative phrase (RP), a taxonomy of resultative constructions is displayed (based on Goldberg and Jackendoff, 2004) in order to test how the syntactic status of the RP is acquired by monolingual English children. As confirmed by the empirical data, the degree of syntactic complexity of the RP correlates with the age of acquisition of resultative constructions.Keywords: resultative phrase, monolingual acquisition, X-Bar Theory, secondary predicate, CHILDES, small clause.

The Main Determinant of English Sentences Comprehension by Chinese EFL Learners: The Verb or the Construction?

Using the self-paced reading, this paper investigated the role of verbs or constructions when Chinese EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners try to understand an English sentence. Previous researches on the main determinant in English sentences comprehension had two different views. Healy and Miller (1970) held that the verb is the main determinant of sentence meaning, while Bencini and Goldberg (2000) held that the construction is directly associated with sentence meaning. However, studies from English as a second language may provide a clue of the main determinant of English sentence meaning. The paper classified English resultatives into four types: the Subcategorized Object Resultative, the Non-subcategorized Object Resultative, the Fake Reflexive Resultative and the No Object Resultative. The paper investigated high-level Chinese English learners’ understanding of the English resultative constructions which have the same surface structure but different deep structures (the first three types). The result showed that the acquisition of subcategorized object resultatives is better than non-subcategorized object resultatives. Therefore, this paper argues that although the construction has a suppressing impact on the verb, the basic determinant of English sentences comprehension by Chinese EFL learners is the verb.

Coercion and leaking argument structures in Construction Grammar

This article investigates the role of coercion and contextual background information in influencing acceptability judgments. Focusing on data from English resultative constructions I propose a usage-based constructional approach that accounts for the factors that allow for a verb’s conventionalized argument structure specifications to leak, thereby allowing otherwise unacceptable nonconventionalized utterances such as ??Ed hammered the metal safe to be judged acceptable by means of coercion. By putting less emphasis on independently existing meaningful constructions I argue that frame-semantic information at the level of lexical units (mini-constructions) can be used effectively to link semantic information to syntactic information to arrive at both lower-level and higher-level constructional descriptions for both decoding and encoding purposes.

Variation and change in English resultative constructions

AbstractThe system of English resultative constructions is in a state of flux characterized by variation between two of its most prominent competitors,way-constructions as inShe worked herwayto the topand reflexive structures as inShe worked herselfto the top.Although this competition has occasionally been addressed in the literature (cf. Jackendoff, 1990:213; Kirchner, 1951:158; Salkoff, 1988:54ff.), the present findings reveal that the long-standing rivalry between these structures has resulted in an increased use of theway-construction at the expense of reflexive structures. In addition, the coexistence ofway-constructions with semantically overlapping reflexive structures eventually culminated in a reorganization of the system of English resultatives involving a diversification of the functions performed by each variant resulting in a semantically motivated division of labour. Theway-construction turns out to be particularly successful in conveying concrete meanings, whereas reflexive structures can still to some extent stand their ground with abstract uses. The present paper relates the proliferation of theway-construction to grammaticalization theory.

Resultative constructions with “implied-result” and “entailed-result” verbs in Thai and English: a contrastive study

This study aims to make a contrastive investigation of the Thai and English transitive-based resultative constructions which consist of a causative predicate indicated by a transitive verb and a resultative predicate linguistically realized as a verb in Thai and an adjective in English. The resultative constructions which are the object of study in this article are those in which the causative predicate is manifested by two kinds of transitive verbs postulated in this article, namely, “implied-result verbs” and “entailed-result verbs”. This article examines one of the syntactic-semantic behavioral properties of both types of verb in both languages when they co-occur with resultative predicates. It is found in this article that English implied-result and entailed-result verbs are much more restricted in taking resultative predicates than the Thai counterparts. In other words, Thai resultative constructions are more productive than English ones. The productivity in the case of the former is attributed to the aspectual profile shift operating in serial verb constructions in Thai. Thai resultative constructions are arguably an instantiation of serial verb constructions. Resultative constructions in Thai allow both conventionalized as well as unconventionalized scenes to be expressed. In contrast, only conventionalized scenes can be expressed by resultative constructions in English.

Towards a history of English resultative constructions: the case of adjectival resultative constructions

This contribution provides a corpus-based investigation of the history of adjectival resultative constructions (RCs), e.g. He wiped the table clean, with special reference to Old English and Middle English. The article first briefly discusses some of the parameters relevant to a synchronic analysis of RCs, namely causativity, causality and force-dynamics, as well as the distinction between adjectival and adverbial RCs (collectively referred to as ARCs since the two types cannot always be differentiated diachronically). The article then shows that the diachronic data point to an expansion of the ARC from very specific instantiations, involving a limited set of verbs and adjectives/adverbs (i.e. the washing and cutting scenarios), to progressively more general types (which, however, set up a coherent network of analogical extensions). It is observed that this evolutionary path correlates with the metaphorical interpretation of actions as forces and the emergence of ‘proper’ causative examples, i.e. examples where the verb only symbolises the causing subevent in the causal chain evoked by the RC. Further, it is argued that this investigation highlights the importance of the usage-based model in linguistic analysis.

On So-called PP Resultative Constructions in English

On So-called PP Resultative Constructions in English