Beyond Telicity and Affected-Theme : Semantic Factors Contributing to the Resultative Interpretation of Predicates in Japanese

This paper discusses semantic factors contributing to the resultative interpretation of predicates in the Japanese te-ir construction. The construction ambiguously takes on either progressive or resultative meanings. This ambiguity is due to the lexical meaning of the verb, and it is the purpose of this paper to single out and characterize the classes of verbs which take on the resultative meaning. l A number of recent studies have focused on the issues of telicity, transitivity, and particularly on unaccusativity and reflexivity, and it has been argued that the resultative interpretation is closely related to the subject's involvement in the resulting state. While accepting this argument, I will show that notions of unaccusativity and reflexivity alone cannot cover all the data. Similarly, I will argue that Kim's (1993) account of the analogous construction in Korean, which refers to the concept "possession," fails to accommodate a certain set of data without making unlikely stipulation. I will demonstrate that there are in fact two separate sets of verbs allowing the resultative meaning. The first set is definable in terms of the subject's involvement, while the second set makes no reference to the subject's involvement in the resulting state. I will characterize the second set as verbs of spatial configuration (Levin 1993) and propose the notion "affected locative" to optimally characterize the semantic feature licensing the resultative meaning in the second set.