Why Can't We Wipe the Slate Clean? A Lexical-Syntactic Approach to Resultative Constructions

Jaume Mateu

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Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation Language, Metaphor, and Cognition Categorization, perception, and language

Abstract

This paper provides a lexical-syntactic account (Hale a Keyser (1993, 1999)) of why Romance languages do not have resultative sentences like John hammered the metal flat or the dog barked the chickens awake. It is argued that there is no principled way to account for this «gap» in terms of semantic and/or aspectual operations available in English but not in Romance. Rather, it is shown that the parametric issue involved in the resultative construction must be related to one empirical fact: the morphological properties associated with the lexical-syntactic element corresponding to the directional relation are not the same in English as in Romance. It is claimed that the parameterization of Talmy's (1985) 'conflation processes', of which the resultative construction is not but a particular instantiation, can be given explanatory power only when they are translated into lexical-syntactic terms. It is argued that the relevant 'lexical subordination process' involved in resultative constructions is carried out by means of a syntactic operation rather than a semantic one. This operation is shown to be possible in English because of its 'satellite-framed' nature (Talmy (1991)). By contrast, the 'verb-framed' nature of Romance languages prevents them from carrying out such an operation. On the other hand, a crucial distinction between true/non-adverbial resultatives (e. g. , John hammered the metal flat) vs. false/adverbial resultatives (e. g. , John cut the meat thin) must be drawn. Both English and Romance have false/adverbial resultatives, but only English has true/non-adverbial resultatives. Parametric variation in the lexical-syntactic domain appears to be only relevant to true resultatives.

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References

2014The Minimalist Program 1985Semantics and Cognition.2013Learnability and Cognition 1994Aspectual Roles and the Syntax-Semantics Interface 1991The syntax of event structure 1997Thematic Roles and Syntactic Structure 1988Small clause results 1993The Projection of Arguments

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