Towards a unified account of resultative constructions in Korean

This paper discusses predicative resultative constructions in Korean and argues that they are actually a kind of clausal resultative construction (see the two types of resultatives in Wechsler and Noh, 2001). In particular, I propose the following hypotheses: (i) the resultative predicate, X-key, is morphosyntactically an adverb rather than an adjective, (ii) X-key forms a fully saturated clause (i.e., result clause) (sometimes with the predication subject omitted), and (iii) the result clause is a complement of the main verb in a resultative sentence. Based on these properties, a unified analysis of the resultative constructions is formalized in Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) (Pollard and Sag, 1994; Sag et al., 2003).