Objects in Resultatives
نویسنده
چکیده
This paper defends an alternative, which I call an outside role analysis of resultative meaning. The resultative describes an event that is distinct from those of its two component predicates; its arguments, the subject and object, identify the agent and patient of this event, independently of any other thematic relations they might enter. Only a semantics like this allows a satisfactory explanation of two central facts. First, the direct object restriction: it is the underlying object of the clause whose referent comes to have the property defined by its secondary predicate, as in (1–3). Second, it may be that the object has no thematic relation to the verb describing the means of change, as in (2). As an additional, third benefit, the outside role analysis facilitates a simple account of cross-linguistic patterns in word order variation. My argument for the first of these three claims, which is the heart of this paper, will rely importantly on facts from Mandarin. Mandarin illuminates crucial points that English leaves dim; most importantly, that a thematic relation to the result predicate depends in no way on a thematic relation to the means verb, contrary to what is said in several important papers (Rappaport Hovav and Levin 2001, Rothstein 2004, Goldberg and Jackendoff 2004). I begin in section 2 by introducing the terms of discussion. I then describe the outside role analysis in section 3, alongside the standard result patient analysis. Section 4 documents patterns in the thematic interpretation of the subject and object, comparing English with Mandarin. These data are a background for section 5, which argues that only the outside role analysis can explain the direct object restriction. Sections 6 and 7 give two further arguments, from sentences like (2) and from word order. I comment briefly on the semantic derivation in section 8, before concluding.
منابع مشابه
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 aba...
متن کاملAn Event Structure Account of English Resultatives
Current syntactic accounts of English resultatives are based on the assumption that result XPs are predicated of underlying direct objects. This assumption has helped to explain the presence of reflexive pronouns with some intransitive verbs but not others and the apparent lack of result XPs predicated of subjects of transitive verbs. We present problems for and counterexamples to some of the b...
متن کاملReflexivity and Resultatives
This paper presents data from Kannada that resist either type of analysis ( 2). The grammar of reflexivity in Kannada reveals that resultatives must be syntactically distinguished both from ECM constructions and from simple transitives. Simple transitives and ECM constructions allow verbal reflexive marking when reflexive, but resultatives do not. To explain this, we assign Kannada resultatives...
متن کاملResultative Markedness and Implicational Hierarchies
This is because the former are lexically implicated or entailed, and thus are more available and less expensive than the latter in the sense that they involve less practical reasoning. In addition, in terms of the strong-weak distinction, an implicational universal can be posited, namely that if a language has strong resultatives, it must have weak resultatives as well (Washio 1999, 2002). Seco...
متن کاملAdverb agreement in Urdu, Sindhi and Punjabi
We discuss agreeing adverbs in Urdu, Sindhi and Punjabi. We adduce crosslinguistic evidence that is based mainly on similar patterns in Romance and posit that there is a close connection between resultatives and so-called pseudo-resultatives, which the agreeing adverbs appear to instantiate. We propose a diachronic relationship by which the originally predicative part of a resultative is reinte...
متن کاملذخیره در منابع من
با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید
عنوان ژورنال:
دوره شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2006