Resultatives: a Joint Operation of Semantic and Syntactic Structures

One of the most challenging aspects of the analysis of resultative constructions in English is the appearance in some cases of what we might call a \nonthematic object," an object that is not a semantic argument of the verb of the clause. This aspect challenges the claim that the grammatical functions of a clause are determined by the lexical properties of the verb of the clause. We need to abandon this claim, while still capturing the observation that we don't freely get nonthematic objects. In this paper, I rst present the problem posed by resultatives to standard assumptions in LFG and I show that there is no adequate solution to the problem preserving these assumptions. I then explore a solution in which the a-structure of resultatives is derived from the event structure of resultatives, which is composition-ally derived from the information in the lexical items that make up the resultative clause. Hence, the a-structure of the clause may be diierent from the a-structure of the verb of the clause. This solution relates the syntactic alternation in the number of grammatical functions involved to the semantic alternation in the event structure of the construction. I lastly address a potential problem posed by the existence of passive forms based on resultatives with nonthematic objects: if the nonthematic object is not part of the lexical information of the verb, and if passivization is a lexical operation, how can the nonthematic object passivize? 1 The Problem A theory of argument structure and its mapping to grammatical functions has to address the fact that verbs that are ordinarily used as intransitives are used with an object in resultative constructions. We will call this object a nonthematic object, although we will see later that this term is somewhat inappropriate. Resultative constructions with nonthematic objects are illustrated in (1). (1) a. The dog barked the neighbors awake. b. Fred shouted himself hoarse. c. Lucy sang her daughter asleep. It is important to note that the verbs in (1) cannot take an object if the clause does not include a resultative phrase, but must take an object if the clause includes a resultative phrase, as the unacceptability of (2) and (3) indicates. We could say that these verbs are obligatorily transitive in a resultative construction, but obligatorily intransitive elsewhere. (Ignore the depictive reading of (4) and similar examples.) (2) *The dog barked the neighbors.