English Resultatives In A Construction Grammar Account

As an important linguistic phenomenon,the resultative construction occupies a unique place in the study of syntax and semantics.For decades of years,English resultative expressions have been a major focus of research on the syntax-semantics interface.Linguists study the resultative constructions from different points of view.Some represented by Chomsky,Simpson and Hoekstra among many others argue that the formation of the resultative constructions is a purely syntactic process.Simpson(1983) holds that a resultative phrase may be predicated only of an immediately postverbal NP. Hoekstra(1988) gives a small clause analysis.Chomsky(1995) abstracts the situation using the vP Shell theory.However,the idiosyncratic nature of the resultative constructions suggests that the view of them as phenomena governed solely by syntactic constraints is inadequate to fully account for their behavior.Some typified by Rappaport and Levin(1999),Wechsler(2001) and some others suggest that the constraints on the formation of the resultative constructions are purely semantic,and that linking rules governing the mapping from syntax to semantics account for syntactic restrictions on the construction,but they also lack strong explanation with the ongoing experimental research. Boas(2000:301) claims that "In order to be able to describe which senses of a verb may occur with a specific semantic and/or syntactic type of result phrase,we must encode this information in the event-frames representing the individual senses of the verbs".It is obvious Boas(2000) takes the implications of the semi-idiosyncrasy of the resultative too far. Then construction grammar emerges as a better approach to construe English resultatives.According to Goldberg(1995),constructions are pairings of meaning and form and cannot be predicted from knowledge of other constructions existing in the grammar,which will give a full and wonderful account of the English resultatives. Goldberg(1995:188) suggested that resultatives can only be applied to arguments which undergo a change of state as a result of the action denoted by the verb.In order to consolidate the constructional view and achieve further explanation,Goldberg and Jackendoff(2004) made proposals about the resultative that they share a certain family resemblance.They classified English resultatives as four types:causative property resultative,noncausative property resultative,noncausative path resultative and causative path resultative.Using the semantics of the constructional subevent,the semantics of the verbal subevent and the semantic relationship between the two,linguists were able to explain many of the distributional properties of resultatives.As far as construction grammar goes,it is no doubt a right theory.However,there exist many idiosyncrasies needed to account for.In order to consolidate the constructional approaches,there is a need to divide English resultatives into adjunct resultatives(e.g., The lake froze solid or He spread the butter thick) and argument resultatives(e.g.,He hammered the metal flat or They yelled themselves hoarse).In this way,some idiosyncratic instances of English resuitatives which bear the below characteristics can be well explained:(1) Resultatives which cannot be appropriately paraphrased by "X becomes Y by V-ing" or "X causes Y to become Z by V-ing";(2) Resultatives which do not obey the Unique Path Constraint;(3) Resultatives of which the result phrase is not directly predicated of the seeming host.Though the present thesis has revealed,the extent to which adjunct resultatives differ from argument structure resultatives,as well as the scope of adjunct resultatives,is greater than has been assumed in these previous studies; there is still a long way to go.However,the author proposes that future studies on resultatives should start by recognizing the distinction between the two types of resultatives,for only after the object of inquiry has been properly identified,can one begin really to understand that object.