English Resultatives Revisited

This paper focusses on the English adjectival resultative construction, as exempliied in examples (1)-(4). (1) John hammered the metal at. (2) The river froze solid. (3) The dog barked itself hoarse. (4) The dog barked the neighbours awake. Result predication occurs with both transitive and intransitive verbs. In the transitive case, the result state is predicated of the object (1). For intransitives, (2) shows that a result state may be predicated of the subject of an unaccusative predicate. 1 When the intransitive verbs is unergative, a result state may be predicated of the single argument by introducing an additional syntactic complement to the verb, coreferential or in some other way closely related to the subject itself (3). However it is also possible to introduce an object, referentially distinct from the subject, of which the result state is predicated. Not all resultatives are interpreted causatively ((2) is not, for example), but note that bark gives causative resultatives in (3) and (4) even though the verb itself is not causative. In gross terms, two diierent styles of analysis have been proposed in the extensive literature on English resultatives. The construction based approach (as in (Goldberg 1995)) holds that An earlier form of this paper was presented as the Argument Structure Workshop at the Grenoble LFG Workshop, August 1996. 1 The terms unaccusative and unergative are used purely descriptively in this paper-we do not postulate a level of syntax at which they are distinct.