The Semantic Determinants of Argument Expression: A View from the English Resultative Construction

In recent literature, argument expression is often taken to be most immediately determined by aspectual properties. This idea is reflected in statements as strong as Tenny’s Aspectual Interface Hypothesis that “Only the aspectual part of thematic structure is visible to the universal linking principles” (1994:2) and in van Hout’s (1996) proposal that many argument expression alternations are instances of event type-shifting — i.e., aspectual reclassification. It is also implicit in Verkuyl’s (1993:20) Plus Principle, a compositionality principle which requires objects to contribute to bounding an event, preventing push and other basically atelic transitive verbs from being analyzed as true transitives (329-349). The most frequently cited aspectual semantic determinants include predicate (or event)-related notions such as telicity and boundedness and NP (or entity)-related notions such as incremental theme (Dowty 1991), measure (Tenny 1987, 1992, 1994), delimiter (Borer 1994; Ritter and Rosen 1998; Tenny 1987, 1992, 1994), and subject of result (Borer 1998). Researchers crucially tie these aspectual notions to the transitivity of the predicate and to the direct objecthood of the relevant NPs.