Constraints on the constructional slots of the Resultative Construction

9.2.1 The VERB-slot

We can begin by looking at the semantic classes of verbs that are tolerated or, conversely, not tolerated by the VERB-slot of the RC. One restriction that has frequently been noted is that the verb must not be stative (177a, b) (Demonte 1987: 3; Rothstein 2000: 260-1; Wechsler 1997:

308).

(177) a. *John loved Mary crazy. (from Rothstein 2000: 261) b. *John lives with his parents poor.

Verbs appearing in the RC must be able to express an activity, because only activities can be interpreted as transmitting some kind of force from the SUBJECT to the OBJECT. Stative verbs, on the other hand, are restricted to constructions that express a homogeneous relation between two entities; a relation is homogeneous when it holds constant at all subparts of a certain in-terval. The hallmark of the RC, however, is that there is a dynamic relation between a S UB-JECT and an OBJECT, in the sense that the OBJECT is changed by the SUBJECT's activity. Proto-typically stative verbs such as love and live are primarily associated with constructions that

have "no a priori causal directionality" (Croft 1991: 219), and where the SUBJECT may there-fore not be regarded as inducing some sort of change affecting the OBJECT.

Similarly, perception verbs cannot usually be associated with the VERB-slot of the RC (178a, b) (cf. Goldberg 1995: 181; Rothstein 2000: 261).

(178) a. *John noticed Mary upset. (from Rothstein 2000: 261) b. *He watched the TV broken. (from Goldberg 1995: 67)

In contrast to situations expressed by stative verbs, the relation between John and Mary or between He and the TV is not necessarily homogeneous. Nevertheless, perception verbs such as see, watch, taste or notice do not normally express transmission of force, but a relation be-tween an experiencer and a stimulus. John in (178a) cannot be seen as initiating an activity that could change Mary's mental state; rather, he simply reacts to the stimulus Mary in an event that does not have any duration to speak of. In (178b), the duration of the TV-watching event is more extended, but it is not the case that the SUBJECT He is the initiator of this event and the OBJECT the TV the passive endpoint. Constructions including perception verbs actu-ally express "a two-way causal relation" because "the experiencer must direct his or her atten-tion to the stimulus, and then the stimulus (or some property of it) causes the experiencer to be (or enter into) a certain mental state" (Croft 1991: 219).

Not all mental verbs are automatically barred from the RC, though. When the verb has a dynamic meaning component, it may well be associated with the VERB-slot of the RC (179a, b).

(179) a. John frightened Mary to death.

b. Medusa stared the hero into stone. (ROS: 20) (from Simpson 1983: 154, fn. 6)

In contrast to the sentences Mary feared John and Medusa saw the hero, which express two-way causal relations, the SUBJECTS of (179) can be interpreted as having more control over the respective event than the OBJECTS, and the OBJECTS can be understood as going through a change of state as a result of the SUBJECTS' (mental) actions.

What is of paramount importance, then, is that the elements occupying the VERB-role in the RC are "dynamic, i.e. require a continual input of energy if they are not to come to an end" (Comrie 1976: 13). There are few complications to this picture, though, because dy-namic verbs do not constitute a uniform class. The most common verb typologies distinguish between at least two aspectual categories of dynamic verbs: while activities (or imperfective verbs), which are ongoing in time, denote undelimited events, accomplishments (or perfective verbs), which have a definite duration and an inherent endpoint, express delimited events (cf.

Comrie 1976: 13; Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 52; Parsons 1990: 183; Tenny 1994: 4-5).

Activities can thus be "protracted indefinitely or broken off at any point", whereas

accom-plishments "have a terminal point" when the situation "automatically terminates" (Comrie 1976: 44). There are a number of tests that are sensitive to the distinction between activities and accomplishments: the atelic durational phrase for x time normally occurs with activities (180a), but not with accomplishments (180a'), while the telic durational phrase or frame ad-verbial in x time is more at home with accomplishments (180b) than with activities (180b') (Mittwoch 1982: 115; Pustejovsky 1991: 61-2). Frame adverbials are felicitous with accom-plishments because they measure the interval between the duration part and the culmination part of the accomplishment; activities, however, have no culmination and can therefore only be modified by an atelic durational. Similarly, when the adverb almost modifies an activity, we interpret the sentence to mean that the activity has not even started (180c); when it modi-fies an accomplishment, on the other hand, an ambiguity arises because either the activity has not started at all, or it has started but has not reached its culmination yet (180c') (Pustejovsky 1991: 71). Almost can thus modify either the culmination part of an accomplishment or both the duration and the culmination part, while an activity only has a duration part that is open to modification (Pustejovsky 1991: 71-2; see also Parsons 1990: 171). Lastly, while inferences between progressive and perfective versions of activity-sentences are valid, they are invalid for accomplishments (180d, d') (Parsons 1990: 169-70; Saeed 1997: 112). Activities have the

"subinterval property" because "whenever they are true at a time interval, then they are true at any part of that interval" (Krifka 1998: 197): the activity John is kicking the dog therefore implies that John has kicked the dog during every subinterval of the kicking-event. The subin-terval property does not hold of accomplishments, which consist of both a duration and a culmination component: when John is engaged in the activity of killing the dog, he has not killed the dog in every subinterval of this event but only at the culmination of the whole event. On the basis of these tests, we see that the RC clearly patterns with accomplishments, and not with activities (180e-e'').

(180) a. John kicked the dog for ten minutes.

a'. ??John killed the dog for ten minutes.

b. John killed the dog in ten minutes.

b'. ??John kicked the dog in ten minutes.

c. John almost kicked the dog.

c'. John almost killed the dog.

d. John was kicking the dog. ⊃ John has kicked the dog.

d'. John was killing the dog ⊃ John has killed the dog.

e. John painted the door red in an hour/ ??for an hour.

e'. John almost painted the door red.

e''. John was painting the door red ⊃ John has painted the door red.

Several linguists dealing with the semantics of the RC maintain that only verbs expressing accomplishments can be used in the RC because a resultative sentence such as (181a) denotes a delimited event, while "[a]ctivity verbs, which are inherently atelic and therefore cannot in

principle code a result state ..., do not take resultative predicates" (Van Valin 1990: 255).

Since a verb such as paint can also be used as an activity verb (181b), a number of semanti-cists argues that paint in (181a) expresses an extended sense of the verb as an accomplishment and can therefore be used in the RC.

(181) a. John painted (accomplishment) the door red.

b. John painted (activity) the door.

The usual tenor of formalist grammarians is that every verb intrinsically belongs to one spe-cific event type (Pustejovsky 1991: 55-6), and that there are lexical rules which systematically shift an activity verb into an accomplishment verb (Pustejovsky 1991: 64-5). Tenny, for in-stance, argues that resultative phrases "make their parent verbs into change-of-state of verbs"

(1994: 37), and Rothstein maintains that "resultative predication can force an aspectual shift in an activity verb producing an accomplishment" (2000: 260). The lexical rule creating an extended accomplishment sense for an activity verb (cf. 182a) has been formalised in various ways. Levin and Rapoport, for example, engineer the argument structure of the extended verb sense with the help of their Lexical Subordination Rule (1988: 282), which has already been described in 8.1.3; the representation in (182b') roughly means that John causes the door to become red by performing the activity expressed by paint1 (182b). A slightly different lexical representation of the extended sense of water in the resultative sentence The gardener wa-tered the tulips flat has been proposed by Carrier and Randall. While the lexical structure of the basic activity verb water1 can be represented as (182c), meaning 'The gardener caused water to come to be on the tulips', the "Resultative Formation" rule creates the extended ac-complishment sense of water2, which may be formalised as (182c') (Carrier and Randall 1993:

125). In plain English, the meaning of water2 is "the gardener's watering the tulips caused the tulips to become flat" (Carrier and Randall 1993: 125). In contrast to Levin and Rapoport's Lexical Subordination Rule, the agent of the resultative/accomplishment sentence is thus thought to be not an individual, but the whole activity expressed in the basic sememe, with some special linking rules guaranteeing that the agent activity is only represented by the sin-gle NP the gardener in the syntax (Carrier and Randall 1993: 129; for other formalisations of the activity/accomplishment contrast, see Guéron and Hoekstra 1995: 99-101 and Randall 1983: 85-6).

(182) a. paint1(activity) ⇒ paint₂(accomplishment) b. paint1: [John 'paint' the door]

b'. paint2: [John CAUSE [the door BECOME (AT) red] BY paint1].

c. water1: CAUSE ([the gardener], [INC BE (WATER [PLACE-c AT [P ONthe tulips]])])

c'. water2: CAUSE ([water1], [INC BE (the tulips, [PLACE-a AT [flat]])])

An important consequence of lexical rules changing an activity verb into an accomplishment verb is that the argument structure of the verb is also changed: while an activity verb is biva-lent, requiring a subject and a direct object, an accomplishment verb is trivabiva-lent, subcategoris-ing for a resultative phrase in addition to the subject and object arguments. The activity verbs paint1 and water1 take only two arguments, yet the accomplishments paint2 and water2 require the additional resultative arguments red and flat, respectively. Along the same lines, Simpson contends that the sentence John hammered the metal contains the bivalent activity sememe of the verb (183a), while John hammered the metal flat is an instance of the trivalent accom-plishment sememe (183a') (1983: 148-9).

(183) a. hammer1: <hammerer (Subject), thing hammered (Object)>

a'. hammer2: <hammerer (Subject), thing hammered (Object), result (Xcomp)>

(from Simpson 1983: 148-9)

The lexical-rule approach, which is used by grammarians to defend the idea that the sentence is built up from the verb, is fraught with difficulties (cf. 8.1.3). It is, as we have seen, a circu-lar approach because the only basis for ascribing different senses and valencies to verbs is their appearance in different syntactic contexts. In a non-discrete framework, it is not neces-sary that "the verb in isolation" (Wechsler 1997: 308) can be established as an activity or an accomplishment. As some grammarians have pointed out, the distinction between aspectual verb classes does not depend on the verb alone, but on the whole verb phrase (Comrie 1976:

45-6; Parsons 1990: 38-9). A Construction-grammar framework goes even further and claims that the meaning of a verb such as paint can be kept constant across different syntactic envi-ronments, and that the activity or accomplishment semantics of sentences such as (181a, b) must be attributed to the meaning of the respective constructions. Since an RC always denotes an event in which one entity is changed through the force transmitted by that entity, its mean-ing is necessarily that of an accomplishment. By the same token, non-discrete syntax does not distinguish between valencies of verbs in isolation. The SUBJECT, OBJECT, and RESULTATIVE

phrases are not arguments of the verb, but are, like the verb itself, roles within the RC.¹¹⁶

116 In an alternative approach that retains argument structures for verbs, the argument structure of a resultative sentence "is determined by the composite effects of the verb and the construction"; in a particular sentence, the arguments of the construction and the arguments of the verb get fused (Goldberg and Jackendoff, to appear). A more radical constructional approach does not work with independent argument structures for verbs, but that does not mean that the concept of valency must be relinquished altogether. Without a doubt, constructional roles differ as to whether they are referential and denote a participant in the event, or predicative and express a relation

The need for constructions is also accepted by a generative grammarian like Jackendoff, who criticises the lexical-rule approach that posits additional accomplishment sememes for intransitive activity verbs: "To say this is in the lexicon in the sense 'stored in long-term memory' makes the otiose claim that every appropriate verb carries around yet another argu-ment structure frame" (2002: 176). Rather, he asserts that "the lexicon contains an idiomatic resultative construction" that is "a lexical item in its own right that undergoes free combina-tion with verbs" (2002: 176). By rejecting syntactic and semantic discreteness with respect to resultative sentences, Jackendoff comes very close to a Construction-grammar account. There is a point where his account parts company with the analysis of resultative sentences proposed here, though: Jackendoff works in an intersystemically discrete framework because he pre-supposes separate levels for syntactic and semantic representations. Syntax and semantics do not form an interrelated functional whole in his framework, but are treated as separate systems that are only partially related by interface rules (cf. 8.1.2). (184a) presents his and Goldberg's syntactic representation of the RESULTATIVE Construction, which consists of a subject, a verb, a postverbal NP and an AP. When we take the sentence The gardener watered the plants flat as an example, the semantic representation in (184b) reads as follows: there is an event in which an entity X ('the gardener') causes the event of an entity Y ('the plants') to come to be in a cer-tain state Z ('flat'). This causative event is modified by a means event: the event of the gar-dener's watering the plants is the means by which the main event (the gargar-dener's causing the plants to become wet) comes about. To simplify greatly, Jackendoff and Goldberg's semantic structure conveys the sense that the gardener caused the plants to become wet by watering them. In order to bring together the syntax and the semantics of the resultative construction, Goldberg and Jackendoff suggest correspondence rules, which relate some elements in the syntactic representation with some elements in the semantic representation (these relations are shown by indices on the respective elements) (to appear).

(184) a. Syntax: NP1 V NP2 AP3

b. Semantics: X₁ CAUSE [Y₂ BECOME Z₃]

MEANS: [verbal subevent]

(from Goldberg and Jackendoff, to appear)

Goldberg and Jackendoff's semantic representation is much more complex than the syntax of resultative sentences suggests because it consists of a main event (the "constructional subevent") and a modifying means event (the "verbal subevent"). Only a loose fit can be

between participants. It would lead us too far afield to describe the concept of valency in ways that are palatable to Construction grammar here. A good reassessment of the notions 'predicate' and 'valency' from a cognitive point of view, which also allows for gradience and prototypicality, has been provided by Langacker, for instance (1987: 277-327).

found between syntax and semantics in (184): the main verb in the syntactic representation is demoted to a position in the modifying verbal subevent, and the predicate of the main con-structional subevent is the abstract operator CAUSE. There are also many elements in the semantic structure that do not have a counterpart in the syntax, such as the operators CAUSE, BECOME and MEANS. Goldberg and Jackendoff's semantic representation consorts ill with a strictly functional approach because it does not seem to describe the semantics of the resul-tative sentence The gardener watered the plants wet, but rather the semantic relations behind the paraphrase The gardener caused the plants to become wet by watering them, which Jackendoff and Goldberg argue to underlie the resultative sentence. Although the jury is still out on the issue of intersystemic discreteness, functional grammars consider it more adequate to treat syntactic and semantic elements as symbolic units, and they therefore neither allow the high degree of non-isomorphism between syntax and semantics evident in (184), nor the use of abstract operators. The extralinguistic model of force transmission is a way of achiev-ing a maximally close fit between syntax and semantics. The controversy over intersystemic discreteness vs. non-discreteness aside, both Goldberg and Jackendoff's and my account share the view that it is not the verb in isolation, but the whole construction that is responsible for the resultative semantics. What is necessary is that the verb can denote transmission of force, not that it is an accomplishment in isolation.

Not every dynamic verb that can express transmission of force is compatible with the RC, though. There is a clearly circumscribed aspectual class of dynamic verbs in English that cannot fill the VERB-slot of the RC. In (185a), John was involved in the activity of drinking his coffee, and the event was finished when the coffee was completely consumed. The verb drink, however, is not licit in an RC such as (185a'), meaning that John drank his coffee until it got cold. Similarly, in (185b) Mary was engaged in the activity of building a house, which terminated when the house was complete; again, build is incompatible with the RC (185b') and cannot be used in a sentence conveying the sense that Mary built a house until it was big.

(185) a. John drank his coffee.

a'. !John drank his coffee cold.

b. Mary built a house.

b'. *Mary built a house big. (ROS: 88)

The entities filling the OBJECT-slots in the construction illustrated by sentences (185a) and (185b) measure out the events referred to by the verbs drink and build by providing a scale along which the event progresses over time until the endpoint of the scale has been reached (Tenny 1994: 94-5). For verbs of consumption (e.g. drink or eat) this is the point when the referent of the OBJECT has been completely consumed; for verbs of creation (e.g. build or draw), it is the point when the referent of the OBJECT has been completed. For verbs of

per-formance such as sing (an aria) or play (a game of chess), to mention another related seman-tic verb class, the terminal point is reached when the entity in the OBJECT-slot has been com-pletely 'passed through' (Tenny 1994: 17-8). The construction instantiated by sentences such as John ate an apple and Mary built a house can be calledINCREMENTAL-THEME Construction because "increments of the house or the apple, as they are created or consumed, correspond to the temporal progress of the event. Moreover, there is a final increment which marks the tem-poral end of the event" (Tenny 1994: 15). In other words, material increments of the entities in the OBJECT-slot are associated with temporal increments of the activities denoted by the verbs up to a final increment of the entity that corresponds to the temporal end of the event (Krifka 1998: 213; Tenny 1994: 18).

Caution must again be taken to associate the incremental-accomplishment meaning not with the verbs in isolation, but with the semantics of the INCREMENTAL-THEME Construction as a whole. It is an important characteristic of this construction that the OBJECT-slot must be filled by quantified NPs such as an apple or two houses because only quantified NPs are spa-tially bounded and therefore possess a final increment. Since verbs such as eat, build or read may also be found in constructions that express undelimited activities such as John likes eat-ing ice cream, Mary builds houses as a profession or John is readeat-ing in the garden (Mittwoch 1982: 114; Tenny 1994: 44), it cannot be the verbs in isolation that inherently express incre-mental accomplishments, but the combination of the verb and the construction it appears in.

When paint and eat are both found in activity and accomplishment constructions, the question automatically arises why the canonical accomplishment construction for paint is the RC, while the typical accomplishment construction for eat is the INCREMENTAL-THEME Con-struction. The association between a lexical item and a constructional role is based on the de-gree of semantic compatibility between the lexical item and the construction. Verbs such as

When paint and eat are both found in activity and accomplishment constructions, the question automatically arises why the canonical accomplishment construction for paint is the RC, while the typical accomplishment construction for eat is the INCREMENTAL-THEME Con-struction. The association between a lexical item and a constructional role is based on the de-gree of semantic compatibility between the lexical item and the construction. Verbs such as