Introducing the model of force dynamics

The RESULTATIVE Construction (RC) is made up of four syntactic components: a SUBJECTNP, a VERB, an OBJECT NP, and a RESULTATIVE XP (172a). As a rule, the resultative phrase is real-ised by an AP (or, less frequently, a PP) when it expresses a property that holds of the OBJECT

(172b, b'), but by an NP when it denotes a function or name attributed to the OBJECT (172c, c').¹¹⁴

(172) a. [[S^{UBJECT NP}] [V^ERB] [O^BJECTNP] [R^ESULTATIVEXP]]. b. [[John] [painted] [the door] [red]].

b'. [[John] [stabbed] [Bob] [to death]]. c. [[The members] [appointed] [Mary] [director]]. c'. [[The parents] [named] [their child] [Peter]].

To come away with a deeper understanding of the RC, it is necessary to reveal the semantic relations underlying and tying together these four syntactic components. Loosely speaking, sentences instantiating the RC express the state that holds of the OBJECT-entity as a result of the action denoted by the verb (173).

(173) a. John washed his shirt white.

b. Mary pushed the door open.

c. The potter baked the clay hard. (from Jackendoff 1990a: 226) d. The machinist filed his chisels sharp. (from Jackendoff 1990a: 226) e. The gardener sprinkled the shoots wet. (from Randall 1983: 81) f. John blew his hair dry.

g. Mary combed her hair smooth.

h. Bob sliced the cheese thin.

Discrete grammars do not usually provide a coherent semantic analysis of the RC and are, as we have seen, content to describe the putative syntactic relations obtaining between the con-structional elements, such as the valency relation between the main verb and its arguments and the status of the resultative XP as a complement or adjunct. Since non-discrete grammars dispense with syntactic relations, they must look for the 'glue' holding together the elements of the RC in the semantics.

There are several approaches in modern linguistics which bring a focus to bear on the meaning of sentences instead of their syntax. To mention just one prominent representative of sentential semantics: event or situation semantics seeks to categorise sentences into distinct classes of events such as activities or states, and to closely explain the semantic structure of

114 This categorial distribution holds almost exceptionless; cases in which a property is expressed by a (pre-modified) ^NP such as Mary painted the barn a pale shade of green are few and far between, and I know of no instances where a function or name could be realised by an AP.

these events (Pustejovsky 1995: 67-75; Saeed 1997: 107-8). This approach usually operates within the framework of formal or objectivist semantics (cf. 8.3), and is based on the assump-tion "that there are nonlinguistic things in the world corresponding to ... linguistic items ...:

there are, in the world, events, processes, and states" (Parsons 1990: 20). A particular sen-tence thus refers to an exemplar of some event type in the world. The idea of describing the meaning of sentences in terms of non-linguistic events goes back as far as Aristotle and has been revived in the philosophical and linguistic literature since the 1960s (Parsons 1990: 34).

Rothstein has recently submitted a semantic analysis of the RC within an event-based framework, using the resultative sentence Mary painted the house red as an example (174) (2000: 253-4).

(174) ∃e [∃e1 ∃e2 [e = ^S(e1 e2) ∧ PAINT(e1) ∧ Ag(e1) = MARY ∧ Th(e1) = THE HOUSE ∧ RED(e2) ∧ Arg1(e2) = THE HOUSE ∧ PART-OF(cul(e1),e2) ∧ PAST(e)]

(from Rothstein 2000: 254)

Although Rothstein's semantic representation bristles with imposing symbols, the gist of it is actually quite easy to understand. At the risk of being long-winded, we can work through the above formula step by step. The event expressed by the sentence Mary painted the house red consists of two subevents e1 and e2, which are combined by a summing operation (^S) to yield the complex event e. The summing operation is conditioned by the PART-OF operator, which guarantees that the two events are not simply added together, but that they overlap, with the culmination point of e1 becoming part of e2. Both the subevents and the complex event are expressed by variables that are existentially quantified to make clear that the event type de-noted by the sentence is instantiated by one specific, temporally and spatially bounded exem-plar (cf. Parsons 1990: 23). PAINT and RED are the respective predicates of the two subevents, and they denote sets of 'painting' and 'be red' events. The predicates combine with a certain number of individuals participating in the respective events; those participants are assigned thematic roles illustrating the nature of their participation, such as AGENT (Ag), THEME (Th), or simply ARGUMENT (Arg). The conjuncts that add the thematic roles to the formula make it possible to define subsets of the set of events denoted by the verbs (cf. Roth-stein 1998: 2), in this case the subset of painting events that have Mary as AGENT and the house as THEME, and the subset of 'be red'-events that have the house as ARGUMENT. The operator PAST at the end of the formula indicates that the sentence is true when the state of affairs expressed by it held true at some previous point in time (cf. Parsons 1990: 27-8). In plain, but stilted English, the logical translation of the resultative sentence Mary painted the house red conveys the following meaning: 'There was a particular event, which consisted of an event of Mary painting the house and an event of the house being red; the culmination of

the event of Mary painting the house was part of the event of the house being red, i.e. the house was red at the culmination of the painting event' (cf. Rothstein 2000: 254).

While Rothstein's analysis directly engages the meaning relations behind the RC and not just its syntax, it does not, in my judgement, furnish a satisfactory answer to the semantic sub-tleties and intricacies of resultative sentences. The meaning of the RC is formulated within a semantic framework that does not show any systematic connections with the syntactic form of the sentence and relies on unexplicated semantic primitives such as AGENT, THEME, and PART-OF. In particular, there is no necessary connection between Mary and the house, i.e.

the fact that the house is changed by Mary's volitional action is only introduced via thematic roles; similarly, no necessary connection exists between the predicate paint and the predicate red, i.e. the fact that the house is red as a result of the action of painting is merely imposed on the semantics by the primitive PART-OF relation. The acceptance of such primitives could lead to the abandonment of the otherwise fruitful hypothesis that the semantics of a construc-tion is a symbolic reflecconstruc-tion of its syntactic form, i.e. that syntax and semantics are not two discrete systems that could each be described in its own terms, but form an interrelated sym-bolic whole. An intersystemically non-discrete approach would therefore not consign the in-terpretation of a sentence to some formal metalanguage, but attempt to reveal the symbolic relations holding between the syntactic and semantic components of the sentence in a concep-tually plausible fashion (cf. figure 2 in 8.1.3).

I propose that the conceptual model underlying the RC is best described by the notion of 'force dynamics', which has been introduced into the linguistic literature by Talmy (1976) and expanded upon by Croft (1991: 162-3). Force dynamics is "one of the preeminent conceptual organizing categories in language" (Talmy 1988: 96), and expresses human beings' conceptu-alisation of causality as "individuals acting on individuals, with some notion of transmission of force determining which participant is 'first' in the causal order or causal chain" (Croft 1991: 162). The notion of force dynamics, which is widely used by cognitive linguists (e.g.

Langacker 1999b: 46) and has been successfully applied to a variety of linguistic phenomena such as modal meaning (Talmy 1988), can be effectively used to elucidate the semantic rela-tions behind the RC as well.

A force-dynamic event contains two participants, with one (the 'initiator') acting on the other (the 'endpoint'). Drawing on Talmy (1976), Croft develops a system of causation types modelled on the notion of force dynamics (1991: 167). In this system, four causation types can be differentiated on the basis of the status of the participants as physical or mental entities (table 9).

Table 9: Classification of force-dynamic causation types

Initiator Endpoint Causation Type

physical physical physical

mental physical volitional

physical mental affective

mental mental inducive

(from Croft 1991: 167)

In a physical causation type, a non-sentient entity acts on another non-sentient entity (e.g.

175a), while in a volitional causation event, a mental entity affects a physical entity (e.g.

175b). An affective causation type is the reverse of volitional causation because it refers to events in which a physical entity acts on a mental entity (e.g. 175c). Finally, an inducive event describes a situation in which a mental participant acts on another mental participant (e.g.

175d). It is important to note that force-dynamic relations do not describe real-world physical and psychological events, but pertain to commonsense notions of physical or psychological occurrences in our experience (Talmy 1988: 91-5).

(175) a. The ball hit the window.

b. John kicked the ball.

d. The buildings captured John's attention.

e. John persuaded Mary to stay.

The causation type relevant to the RC is volitional causation: in (172b), the mental entity John exercises his will to act on the physical entity the door. In (172b', c), both the initiators and the endpoints are sentient entities, but the endpoints do not act as volitional participants in the events: when John stabs Bob to death or the members appoint Mary director, Bob and Mary are simply acted upon by the SUBJECTs' actions and do not initiate any action of their own. In a similar vein, a sentence such as John kicked Bob (for 175b) would still constitute an instance of volitional causation.¹¹⁵ Volitional causal chains can also be circular when the initiator is identical to the endpoint, i.e. when the first participant acts on himself or herself (176a, a') (cf.

Croft 1991: 172), and they can be parallel when one initiator acts on two endpoints (176b) or two initiators act on one endpoint (176b') (cf. Croft 1991: 174).

(176) a. John painted himself red.

a'. Mary appointed herself director.

115 The idea that certain objects belong to two taxonomic classes has been formalised by Pustejovsky's 'dotted types' (1995: 93). This notion may be illustrated with the example of a book, which can be both a physical object (That book is heavy!) and an information-bearing object (That book is interesting!), a double nature that is indi-cated by the following representation: [physical object ● information object]. Similarly, human beings are both volitional and physical entities and can therefore be represented as dot objects as well: [volitional object ● physical object] (see also Jackendoff 2002: 374).

b. John stabbed Mary and Bob to death.

b'. John and Mary appointed Bob director.

All of these sentences express a single resultative event that is abstracted from the network of occurrences in our experience. Note that the RC can only code one causally linked event: the action denoted by the VERB must directly cause the change of state of the OBJECT, i.e. "causa-tion must be direct; no intervening time in a causal sequence is possible" (Goldberg 1991: 82).

In other words, the RC John scrubbed the pots shiny cannot mean that John was involved in the activity of scrubbing the pots, but that the pots became shiny only after some intermediary time interval, or even that they became shiny only because Mary scrubbed them again after-wards (cf. Croft 1991: 160; Goldberg 1991: 81-2; Goldberg and Jackendoff, to appear). Two events that are causally or temporally unrelated must be expressed in two separate clauses:

John scrubbed the pots, and they became shiny after a few hours; John scrubbed the pots, and after Mary scrubbed them again, they became shiny.

To arrive at an empirically reliable and conceptually convincing non-discrete description of the RC, it is necessary to examine which lexical items can be associated with the four roles of this construction. In the sections that follow, I will do this groundwork by elaborating on each of these conditions in relatively full detail. The various constraints on the roles of the RC should not be seen as a random assortment of isolated facts, but as systematically deriving from the force-dynamic semantics underlying the whole construction.