To Appear (2004), Language1

The English Resultative as a Family of Constructions*

Adele E. Goldberg and Ray Jackendoff

University of Illinois and Brandeis University

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4088 Foreign Languages Building

707 Matthews Ave.

Urbana, IL 61801-0168

[email protected]

Volen Center for Complex Systems

Brandeis University

Waltham, Mass

02454-9110

[email protected]

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 Abstract

English resultative expressions have been a major focus of research on the syntax-semantics

interface. The present paper argues that a family of related constructions is required to

account for their distribution. We demonstrate that a number of generalizations follow from

the semantics of the constructions we posit: the syntactic argument structure of the sentence

is predicted by general principles of argument linking; the aspectual structure of the sentence

is determined by the aspectual structure of the constructional subevent, which is in turn

predictable from general principles correlating event structure with change, extension,

motion, and paths. Finally, the semantics and syntax of resultatives explain the possibilities

for temporal relations between the two subevents. At the same time that these

generalizations clearly exist, there is also a great deal of idiosyncrasy involved in

resultatives. Many idiosyncratic instances and small subclasses of the construction must be

learned and stored individually. The account serves to justify aspects of what we share in

our overall vision of grammar, what we might call the ‘constructional’ view. To the extent

that our treatment of the resultative can be stated only within the constructional view, it

serves as evidence for this view as a whole.*

1. A constructional view of grammar

For fifteen years, the English resultative construction has been a focus of research on the

syntax-semantics interface. Each of us has made proposals about the resultative (Goldberg 1991;

Goldberg 1995; Jackendoff 1997a; Jackendoff 1990) proposals that share a certain family
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resemblance. The present paper is an attempt to consolidate what our approaches have in

common and to add some new wrinkles to our common understanding. Our larger purpose is not

only to show the virtues of our account of resultatives, but also to justify aspects of what we

share in our overall vision of grammar, what we might call the ‘constructional’ view. To the

extent that our treatment of the resultative can be stated only within the constructional view, it

serves as evidence for this view as a whole.

In the interest of being maximally provocative, let’s start by stating some aspects of the

overall vision.

(1) The Constructional View:

a. There is a cline of grammatical phenomena from the totally general to the totally

idiosyncratic.

b. Everything on this cline is to be stated in a common format, from the most particular,

such as individual words, to the most general, such as principles for verb position, with

many subregularities in between. That is, there is no principled divide between

‘lexicon’ and ‘rules.’

c. At the level of phrasal syntax, pieces of syntax connected to meaning in a

conventionalized and partially idiosyncratic way are captured by constructions.1

(Goldberg, 1992; Goldberg, 1995; Goldberg, 1999; Goldberg, to appear-a; Jackendoff, 1990,

2002)

These tenets of the constructional view have been developed by each of us in different ways

(Goldberg, 1992, 1995, 1999, to appear-a; Jackendoff, 2002); for closely related versions see, for
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example, (Ackerman and Nikolaeva, 2004; Barðdal, 1999; Booij, 2002; Croft, 2001; Culicover,

1999; Fillmore et al., in progress; Fried, to appear; Kay, 2002; Kay and Fillmore, 1999; Lakoff,

1987; Langacker, 1987, 1991, 1992; Michaelis and Lambrecht, 1996; Sag, 1997; Zwicky, 1994);

for a review of various other positions that call themselves ‘constructional,’ see (Goldberg, to

appear-c: chapter 3).

Constructional approaches can be distinguished from traditional lexicalist approaches in

that the latter approaches emphasize the role of words (particularly lexical heads) in determining

phrasal patterns (Bresnan, 1982; Hudson, 1990; Pollard and Sag, 1987, 1994). The present

approach, on the other hand, expands this notion of the lexicon to include phrasal patterns with or

without any morphological specifications in the mental lexicon.

Some constructions are especially easy to spot because they have unusual syntax and/or

bits of specified morphology, as indicated by italics in the examples given below:

(2) a. Our friends won’t buy this analysis, let alone the next one we propose. ("let alone,"

Fillmore et al., 1988)

b. One more pseudo-generalization and/or I’m giving up. (NP and/or S, Culicover and

Jackendoff, 1997)

c. The more we study resultatives, the crazier they get. (comparative correlative,

Culicover and Jackendoff, 1997; Michaelis, 1994)

d. Day by day the facts are getting murkier. (N-P-N, Williams 1994, Oehrle 1998)

Another type of construction involves garden-variety syntax, but there is some special meaning

attached which imposes special restrictions. These are harder to detect, but we each have argued

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(Jackendoff 1990, Goldberg 1992, 1995) that the examples in 3 involve constructional meaning;

3b is of course the resultative.

(3) a. I’ll fix you a drink. (Ditransitive)

b. Fred watered the plants flat. (Resultative)

In between these are constructions where a standard syntactic position is occupied by a special

element that marks the construction:

(4) a. Bill belched his way out of the restaurant. (Way-construction, Goldberg 1995,

Jackendoff 1990)

b. We’re twistin’ the night away. (Time-away construction, Jackendoff, 1997)

In each of these cases, some special interpretation is associated with the syntactic structure.

For instance, the NP and/or S construction 2b means, informally, ‘If some contextually determined

event happens/doesn’t happen that involves NP, then S’. The time-away construction 4b means

roughly ‘subject spends time frivolously doing V’. And our quarry here, the resultative

construction 3b, means roughly ‘subject makes object become AP by V-ing it’. Constructions are

like traditional idioms: they are listed in the lexicon with a syntactic structure, a meaning, and

(where there is a special morpheme) a partial phonology. Like idioms such as take NP to task,

constructions may have argument positions. For instance, the apparent object the night in 4b is

actually the object of the construction, not the object of the verb twistin’; and flat in the

resultative 3b is an argument of the construction, not of the verb water.

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 An important innovation in the constructional view is that in VP constructions such as 3

and 4, the VP’s complement structure is not determined by the verb alone, as is assumed in most

of mainstream generative grammar as well as in many functionalist traditions (e.g., Langacker

2003). On our view, argument structure is determined by the composite effects of the verb and

the construction.2 One of the crucial issues in the constructional view is to work out how this

composite is constructed. The essential point is that the verb does not change its meaning so as to

license these extra arguments: for instance belch in 4a doesn’t get ‘converted’ to a motion verb in

the lexicon or anywhere else. Its contribution to the meaning of 4a is the same as its contribution

to the meaning of Bill belched loudly; it is, in both cases, a verb expressing bodily function and

sound emission. The sense of motion and the sense of repeated belching in 4a come from the

construction and from the way the construction combines semantically with the verb to express a

complex event. Similarly, fix does not in 3a ‘have a beneficiary role’; rather this role comes from

the ditransitive construction, and the verb remains its own boring self, a verb of creation. One

benefit of this approach is considerable reduction in the apparent polysemy of verbs in the lexicon:

the meaning of belch is the same in its various uses. Moreover, Narasimhan (1998) demonstrates

that many verbs that are translations of each other in different languages share the same semantic

implications and aspectual properties, and are used in the same types of discourse contexts.

Nonetheless different languages allow the same verbal meanings to appear in distinct

constructional contexts. Distinguishing verb meaning from the constructions a verb may appear in

allows us to capture these facts. The approach we are suggesting comes at the following obvious

cost: (a) we need to admit meaningful constructions as items stored in the lexicon and (b) we

need to abandon the rigid view that the verb alone determines the complement structure of its VP.

We think the benefit is worth the price.

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 Mainstream generative grammar does not recognize constructions in this sense; phenomena

that have more standardly been termed ‘constructions,’ such as the passive, are taken to be

epiphenomenal outcomes of more general processes in the computational system. Thus a

defender of the classical view might well complain, ‘By introducing so-called constructional

principles, you’re making an arbitrary addition to the theory of grammar. A true explanation of

the resultative would make use of mechanisms we already know.’ This complaint might be

justified if the resultative were the only phenomenon that demanded a construction.

However, as we see, there are many other such phenomena. Consider the way-

construction and the time-away construction, illustrated in 4. We simply see no way that general

principles of syntactic structure and argument structure can predict that English has such

constructions, with the meanings they have. Something has to be stipulated, to the effect that

when way or away is present in a VP under the correct conditions, the proper interpretation

emerges. Regardless of how you wish to do it, you will have to say something special. The

constructional account says it directly, localizing the irregularity in the construction itself rather

than elsewhere in the grammar. Von Stechow 1995, within a formal semantics framework,

localizes it in a special rule of semantic interpretation that has effects quite similar to our

constructions.

In particular, because aspects of these constructions are so rare cross-linguistically, and on

occasion peculiar to English, we would seriously question an attempt to characterize them in

terms of parameter settings in the sense of Principles and Parameters theory. Several other

Germanic languages, including Swedish, Norwegian and Dutch, have a construction that means

pretty much the same as the English way-construction, but Swedish and Norwegian use a
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reflexive instead of X’s way, and Dutch uses a reflexive benefactive form instead of X’s way.

(Seland, 2001; Toivonen, 2002; Verhagen, 2002). These differences seem to us to be brute facts,

stipulations that speakers of each language must learn. When we turn to constructions with

abnormal syntax such as those in 2, the need for English grammar to say something special about

both form and interpretation seems obvious. The proposal, then, is to expand the role of the

traditional lexicon to include productive or semi-productive phrasal patterns that have previously

been assumed to lie within the domain of syntax.

The point is that if indeed constructions in our sense are necessary in the theory of

grammar, there can be no a priori objection to using them to account for the resultative. The

resultative is unusual among the constructions mentioned here only in that it carries no overt

marking of its constructional status, such as way or a weird syntactic structure. It is for this

reason that practitioners of nonconstructional approaches have been able to hold out hope that the

resultative can follow from general principles. We know of no attempts to capture the whole

range of constructional phenomena in other frameworks; we hereby throw down the gauntlet.

In short, we see no justification for rejecting the constructional approach on general theory-

architectural grounds: at least the rule type we propose for resultatives falls under more general

principles. Moreover, it seems clear to us that the construction types in 2 do not lend themselves

at all to the classical approach; and the types in 4 are also problematic , though perhaps not

insuperably so. It seems to us that only the construction types in 3 permit any serious dispute

between the classical and the constructional views, for only in such cases is there a chance that

both the syntax and interpretation may be predicted on general principles. We show here that our

constructional approach provides a coherent story about the resultative construction. We cannot
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prove that no classical solution is possible, but we show what challenges a classical solution must

meet.

2. Dimensions of variation in resultatives

The resultative construction, unlike some of the other constructions mentioned above,

shows a great deal of syntactic and semantic variation. The literature on the whole has treated

resultatives as a unified phenomenon (‘the resultative’). We think this is a mistake. In our own

work (Goldberg 1991, 1995, Jackendoff 1990), we have treated resultatives as forming a sort of

‘family’ of constructions (we might call them ‘subconstructions’ of the resultative), sharing

important properties but differing in certain specifics, including their degree of productivity.3 By

family we have in mind the sort of family resemblances recognized to exist in non-linguistic

categories (Rosch and Mervis, 1975; Wittgenstein, 1955). Our strategy here will be first to

establish a taxonomy of the subconstructions, then to state which of their properties can be

explained by the construction as a whole, and finally to pick out some of the differences. Let's

start by establishing some terminology. An identifying characteristic of a resultative sentence is an

AP or PP that occupies the normal position of a verbal argument, for instance the italicized

phrases in 5. We call this phrase the ‘resultative phrase’ or ‘RP.’

(5) a. Herman hammered the metal flat. [RP = AP]

b. The critics laughed the play off the stage. [RP = PP]

Resultatives must be distinguished from depictive or ‘current-state’ phrases which look

superficially like resultatives (She handed him the towel wet), but which differ syntactically in that
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they are clear adjuncts, not argument phrases, and semantically in that they do not designate states

that are contingent on the action described by the main verb: i.e., they do not designate results.

A resultative may contain a direct object, in which case the RP follows the object, as in 5;

we call such cases ‘transitive resultatives.’ Or a resultative may lack a direct object, in which case

the RP is immediately after the verb, as in 6; we call these ‘intransitive resultatives.’4

(6) Intransitive resultatives

a. The pond froze solid. [RP=AP]

b. Bill rolled out of the room. [RP=PP]

In some transitive resultatives, the direct object is independently selected by the verb; in others it

is not. We refer to the former cases as ‘selected transitive resultatives’ and the latter as

‘unselected transitive resultatives.’

(7) Selected transitive resultatives

a. The gardener watered the flowers flat. [RP=AP]

[cf. The gardener watered the flowers.]

b. Bill broke the bathtub into pieces. [RP=PP]

[cf. Bill broke the bathtub.]

(8) Unselected transitive resultatives

a. They drank the pub dry. [RP=AP]

[cf. *They drank the pub.]

b. The professor talked us into a stupor. [RP=PP]

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 [cf. *The professor talked us.]

A special case of unselected transitive resultatives has a reflexive object that cannot alternate with

other NPs. This is often called a ‘fake reflexive’ (Simpson 1983).

(9) Fake reflexive resultatives

a. We yelled ourselves hoarse. [RP=AP]

Unselected: *We yelled ourselves.

Does not alternate with other NPs: *We yelled Harry hoarse.

b. Harry coughed himself into insensibility. [RP=PP]

Unselected: *Harry coughed himself.

Does not alternate with other NPs: *Harry coughed us into insensibility.

When RP = AP, it normally expresses a property. Some cases of RP = PP also have this

semantics, for example 7b, 8b, and 9b. We refer to these two types collectively as ‘property

resultatives’; when we need to differentiate them we refer to ‘AP property resultatives’ and ‘PP

property resultatives.’ In other sentences with RP = PP, such as 5b and 6b, the RP expresses a

spatial path; we call such sentences ‘PP spatial resultatives.’ There are arguably some adjectives

that express spatial paths or configurations, such as free and clear; these may appear in a class of

‘AP spatial resultatives’ such as He jumped clear of the traffic (see section 8).

To sum up, there are so far three independent dimensions of variation in resultative

sentences, the third of which is further subdivided:

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(10) a. RP = AP vs. RP = PP

b. RP = property vs. RP = spatial configuration

c. Intransitive vs. transitive

i. Within transitive: selected vs. unselected

1. Within unselected: normal vs. fake reflexive

These dimensions are all well known. We must however add one more. One of the NPs in

the sentence is normally understood as undergoing a motion or a change of state whose endpoint

is expressed by the RP; we call this the ‘host’ of the RP. Normally the host of a transitive

resultative is the object, for instance the metal in 5a and the play in 5b. And normally the host of

an intransitive resultative is the subject, for instance the pond in 6a and Bill in 6b. That is, the

choice of host appears to correlate exactly with transitivity and therefore does not constitute an

independent dimension of variation. However, 11 shows a class of transitive examples that has

newly emerged in the literature (Rappaport Hovav and Levin, 2001; Verspoor, 1997; Wechsler,

1997) in which the host is the subject.

(11) Transitive resultatives with subject host

a. Bill followed the road into the forest.

b. We drove Highway 5 from SD to SF.

c. The sailors rode the breeze clear of the rocks.

d. Fred tracked the leak to its source.

e. John danced mazurkas across the room.

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Another distinct subclass is shown in 12, involving verbs of bodily emission (12a,b) (Goldberg, to

appear-a); we can also add verbs of other sorts of substance emission (12c) and verbs of ingestion

(12d,e). In each of these types, the entity in motion is not overtly expressed in the sentence; the

host is therefore an implicit argument.5

(12) Intransitive resultatives with implicit (i.e. non-subject) host

a. Bill spit/urinated/ejaculated/coughed/sneezed out the window.

b. Bill sweated/bled on the floor.

c. The toilet leaked through the floor into the kitchen below.

d. Bill ate off the floor.

e. Bill drank from the hose.

Thus the choice of host proves to be an additional independent dimension in the resultative

construction.

3. The semantics of the resultative

This section proposes structures for the meanings of members of the resultative family, and

in this section and the next we show how these meanings predict many of the properties of

resultative sentences.

As hinted in section 1, the basic intuition behind our constructional approach to resultatives

is that the meaning of a resultative sentence contains two separable subevents. One of them, the

‘verbal subevent,’ is determined by the verb of the sentence. The other subevent, the

‘constructional subevent,’ is determined by the construction. A resultative sentence means more

than just the conjunction of the verbal subevent and the constructional subevent. For instance,
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Willy watered the plants flat does not mean just that Willy both made the plants flat and watered

them. Rather, the two subevents are related: Willy made the plants flat by watering them. That

is, for the bulk of cases (we discuss one class of exceptions below), the verbal subevent is the

means by which the constructional subevent takes place. This paraphrase also shows the

distribution of arguments between the two subevents: Willy is the agent of both subevents, the

plants is the patient of both subevents, and flat is the resulting property in the constructional

subevent. In sections 4-5 we show that many properties of the resultative construction follow

from the semantics of the two subevents and the connection between them.

Using an informal, more or less common-practice semantic notation, we can express the

meaning of Willy watered the plants flat as follows:6

(13) Syntax: Willy watered the plants flat:

Semantics: WILLY CAUSE [PLANTS BECOME FLAT]

MEANS: WILLY WATER PLANTS

If we extract from this example its particular arguments (WILLY, PLANTS, FLAT) and the

particular verbal subevent (WILLY WATER PLANTS), we can discern the semantic contribution of

the construction itself, shown in 14. The subscripts in 14 indicate the correspondences between

the syntactic arguments and the corresponding semantic arguments, correspondences that are

discussed more fully in section 6.

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(14) Causative property resultative

Syntax: NP1 V NP2 AP3

Semantics: X1 CAUSE [Y2 BECOME Z3]

MEANS: [VERBAL SUBEVENT]

With what we have done so far, we can see already that the semantics of the constructional

subevent predicts the syntax of the construction. Consider actual verbs that have the meaning ‘X

cause Y to become Z’, for instance make and get. These show exactly the same distribution of

arguments in syntax as the construction: Willy made/got the plants flat. That is, whatever

generalizations are responsible for mapping the semantics of these ‘intrinsically resultative’ verbs

to their syntactic argument structure, can also be used to map the constructional subevent to its

syntactic argument structure. 7

(15) The semantic argument structure of the constructional subevent determines the

syntactic argument structure of the sentence by general principles of argument

linking.8

This is of course no accident—productive constructions likely arise from speakers generalizing

over verbs that lexically specify the corresponding forms and meanings (Casenhiser and Goldberg,

to appear; Goldberg et al., to appear).

Expressions involving verbs that are inherently resultative (let us call these ‘verbal

resultatives’), often have broader or narrower selectional properties than the general construction.

For example, make allows predicate NPs as well as APs: They made him president/angry.9 We
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can see this is a verbal resultative because the ‘means’ paraphrase, *They caused him to become

angry by making him, makes no sense. Similarly, drive, as in drive NP crazy, allows only a range

of APs and PPs that all refer to demented mental states: nuts, bananas, to distraction, into a

tizzy, and so on (Goldberg 1995; Boas 2000). Again, the ‘means’ paraphrase is out: *He caused

me to become crazy by driving me. This is to be expected if the verbal resultatives are stored as

resultatives: as stored patterns, they may acquire their own idiosyncratic properties. In fact,

verbs that lexically specify a particular construction generally tend to be somewhat broader or

narrower in distribution than productive instances of the pattern. For example, the prototypical

intrinsically ditransitive verb, give, has a broader semantic distribution than constructional

ditransitives such as throw him the ball.10

An anonymous reviewer suggests that it would be preferable to derive semantics from

syntax, instead of allowing the semantics to predict the syntax as we do here. If the syntactic

structure and the semantic structure were isomorphic, it would be impossible to decide between

the proposals, but we demonstrate below that there are semantic properties that are independently

required as they do not follow from syntax. That is, the semantic properties are richer, more

nuanced—syntax can be mapped from them, but not vice versa.

For example, there is more to say about the semantics of the constructional subevent. In

particular, there are two dimensions of variation: property vs. path resultatives and noncausative

vs. causative resultatives.

Property vs. Path resultatives

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 In property resultatives, the constructional subevent consists in the host coming to have

the property expressed by the RP. So, for example, in She watered the plants flat, the

plants come to be flat, and in The pond froze solid, the pond comes to be solid.

In path resultatives, the constructional subevent normally consists of the host traversing the

path expressed by the RP (we discuss a variation with stative verbs in section 4.1). For

instance, in Bill rolled the ball down the hill, the ball travels down the hill. In the follow-

type examples 11 such as Bill followed the leak to its source, the host is subject and travels

a path terminating at the source of the leak. In the spit-type examples 12 such as Sue spit

out the window, the host is the implicit argument, the spit, and it traverses a path that goes

out the window.

Leaving the spit-type and follow-types aside until section 7, a second dimension of variation is

Noncausative vs. causative resultatives

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For some of these, one might argue that the host is a deleted cognate object, as in He spit spit

onto the floor. But this is not true of all of them: the noun cough, for instance, denotes the act of

coughing, not what is coughed up, so *She coughed a cough into the sink is bad.
6
For ease of exposition, we adopt notation that is neutral between our distinct formalizations.

7
Goldberg would amend each of the representations in 14/15 to include INSTANCE as well as

the MEANS relations to indicate that verbs that are lexical resultatives such as make, render,

become are instances of the construction as well; in fact all overt expression is accomplished via

constructions. Jackendoff prefers to treat these verbs as lexically determining their syntax via

more traditional linking rules.

8
Our formulation here abstracts away from any particular approach: whatever means one chooses
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to account for the regular mapping between syntactic and semantic arguments can be applied to

the constructional approach as easily as to a completely verb-driven approach.

9
Boas (2000) notes that make cannot appear as a resultative with a PP=RP (*They made him to

exhaustion). However, it may be possible to treat examples like They made him into a monster as

a type of resultative.
10
Many languages, including Japanese and French, only allow verbal resultatives and do not use

the construction productively with other verbs (Takami, ms; Washio, 1997).

When the host is the subject, the constructional subevent is simply a change of state or

change of position.

When the host is the direct object, the constructional subevent consists in the subject

causing the host to do what it does.

Example 13 is a causative transitive property resultative, with RP=AP. The other major

subconstructions are shown in 16.

(16) a. Noncausative property resultative (e.g. The pond froze solid)

Syntax: NP1 V AP/PP2

Semantics: X1 BECOME Y2

MEANS: [VERBAL SUBEVENT]11

b. Noncausative path resultative (‘intransitive motion construction’, e.g. The ball rolled

down the hill)

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 Syntax: NP1 V PP2

Semantics: X1 GO Path2

MEANS: [VERBAL SUBEVENT]

c. Causative path resultative (‘caused motion construction’, e.g. Bill rolled the ball

down the hill)

Syntax: NP1 V NP2 PP3

Semantics: X1 CAUSE [Y2 GO Path3]

MEANS: [VERBAL SUBEVENT]

A different relation between the verbal and constructional subevents appears in 17. This is

a class of intransitive path resultatives in English in which the verb expresses emission of a sound

(Levin and Rappaport Hovav, 1990):

(17) a. The trolley rumbled through the tunnel.

b. The wagon creaked down the road.

c. The bullets whistled past the house.

d. The knee replacement candidate groaned up the stairs.

Here, as in The ball rolled down the hill, the verbal subevent is the subject performing the action

expressed by the verb – the trolley is rumbling – and the constructional subevent is the subject

moving along the path expressed by the PP – the trolley moves through the tunnel. However, the

meaning of the sentence is not that the verbal subevent is the means by which the constructional

subevent takes place (e.g. the rolling is the means of moving down the hill), but rather that the
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motion causes the sound to be emitted: the rumbling is a result of the trolley’s motion. To see

this difference more clearly, consider examples like 18, which we find ungrammatical:

(18) a. * The car honked down the road.

b. * The dog barked out of the room.

c. * Bill whistled past the house.

These are evidently out because the sound is not a result of the subject’s motion. The car’s

honking and the dog’s barking are separate actions from their motion. In particular, compare 17c

and 18c: the whistling noise is a result of the bullet’s motion in 17c, whereas Bill’s whistling in

18c is a separate volitional act. In 17d and 18a we see that what is critical is not whether the

entity that emits the sound is animate, but rather that the sound must be causally related to the

motion. In 17d we construe the motion to cause the painful groaning; in 18a we recognize the

honking as a sound not caused by the motion of the car. This is not to say that the subevents in 18

cannot be combined into a single clause: the way-construction allows the subevents to be simply

simultaneous rather than causally related:

(19) a. The car honked its way down the road.

b. The dog barked its way out of the room.

c. Bill whistled his way past the house.

We conclude that sound-emission resultatives are not licensed by principle 16b, though they

share the same syntactic form and the same two subevents. Rather they are a consequence of

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principle 20, another subconstruction of the resultative. (We recognize that there are speakers

who accept 18. For them the semantic relation is COOCCURRENCE rather than RESULT.)

(20) Sound emission path resultative

Syntax: NP1 V PP2

Semantics: X1 GO Path2

RESULT: [VERBAL SUBEVENT: X1 EMIT SOUND]

Note that there is a selectional restriction on the verbal subevent, which constrains the

construction to sound emission verbs. Even the closely related class of light emission verbs is

prohibited. For instance, suppose the trolley in 17a is emitting sparks from its wheels as it

rumbles through the tunnel. We still cannot say *The trolley sparked through the tunnel; again

the more liberal way-construction, The trolley sparked its way through tunnel is all right.12

Another tiny class of verbal subevents forms resultatives with the pattern 20. Example 21

gives a couple of examples. Note that an appropriate paraphrase of 21a is not 22a but rather 22b.

(21) a. The witch vanished into the forest.

b. Bill disappeared down the road.

(22) a. *The witch went into the forest by vanishing.

b. The witch went into the forest and thereby vanished.

In short, sound-emission and disappearance resultatives involve a ‘result’ relation between

the constructional subevent and the verbal subevent instead of a ‘means’ relation. There exist
22
generalizations about what types of semantic relationships are more or less likely to be allowed

between verbal and constructional subevents, within and across languages (Goldberg, 1997). But

we do not think that the fact that resultatives allow the verbal event to be either means or result is

entailed by any general considerations of well-formedness of meaning, given that the way

construction readily allows verbs of sound emission in particular to appear without being

interpreted as standing in a means or result relation to the motion (examples in 19). Therefore,

for us this is a crucial point where the resultative begins to fragment into a number of distinct

subconstructions with similar syntax, similar argument structure, and similar constructional

subevents, and where each subconstruction has its own peculiarities of interpretation and its own

selectional restrictions. Moreover, we see no way to semantically unify events of sound emission

with events of disappearance. Note for instance that events of disappearance cannot be used in

the way-construction: *The witch vanished her way into the forest. Thus we reluctantly conclude

that the selectional restriction on the choice of verbal subevent in 20 is a raw disjunction: there is

no explanation to be sought at this level of detail, there is only description. We return to this issue

in section 8.

What makes the (sub)constructions in 14/16/20 form a ‘family’ is their family resemblance

in syntax and semantics. The constructional subevents in the two transitive cases are causative

and have arguments in parallel positions; the two property cases involve change of property; the

three spatial cases involve motion in space.13 Apart from the sound-emission and disappearance

verb classes, the verbal subevent is a means to achieving the constructional subevent. Unlike the

way-construction and time-away construction, none of them has a special morpheme that marks

the construction. The fact that instances of grammatical patterns share family resemblances and

not definitional necessary and sufficient features is highly reminiscent of other sorts of conceptual
23
categories (Jackendoff, 1983; Lakoff, 1987; Murphy, 2002; Rosch and Mervis, 1975; Taylor,

1995; Wittgenstein, 1955). We therefore do not see it as a drawback that our analysis requires

several different but related types of resultatives, but rather as an indication of a parallel with

general cognition.

4. The meaning of resultatives explains their aspectual properties

We now turn from the argument structure properties of resultatives to their aspectual and

temporal properties.

4.1. Telic, atelic, and stative resultatives. There seems to be a widespread view in the

literature that resultative sentences are invariably telic (e.g. Rothstein 2000, Tenny 1994, 36-37;

Boas, 2000; Levin and Rappaport Hovav, 1995; Rappaport Hovav and Levin, 2001; Rothstein,

2000; Tenny, 1994; Van Valin, 1990; Wechsler, 2001); In fact, the term ‘resultative’ suggests that

the sentence expresses the result of some action. However, this view is false, for three reasons.

First, although APs used with predicates of change normally denote the endstate of change

(Goldberg 1991, 1995; Wechsler 2001), the AP constructions A-er and A-er and ever A-er do

not:14 For hours, the mixture got hotter and hotter. When serving as RP, these APs create atelic

resultatives:

(23) Non-end-bounded state of change denoted by an AP, atelic resultatives:

a. For hours, Bill heated the mixture hotter and hotter. [non-repetitive]

b. For hours, Bill hammered the metal ever flatter. [non-repetitive]

c. For years, Penelope wove the shawl longer and longer. [non-repetitive]

24
 Second, path resultatives are telic if and only if the RP is end-bounded (in the sense of

Jackendoff 1996):15

(24) End-bounded spatial PPs, telic resultatives:

a. Bill floated into the cave (*for hours [on non-repetitive reading])

b. Bill pushed Harry off the sofa (*for hours [on non-repetitive reading])

Non-end-bounded spatial PPs, atelic resultatives:

c. Bill floated down the river (for hours [non-repetitive])

d. Bill pushed Harry along the trail (for hours [non-repetitive])

Third, there exist stative sentences that are indistinguishable from path resultatives in both

syntactic structure and argument structure properties.

(25) Stative path resultatives

a. The road zigzagged down the hill.

b. The rope stretched over the pulley.

c. The weights stretched the rope over the pulley.

Example 25a is paralleled by the typical intransitive path resultative Barbara zigzagged down the

hill, but it is not a motion sentence. Examples 25b,c can be construed either as change of state

(e.g. the rope gradually stretches) – in which case they fall under standard resultatives – or as

continued states of tension in the rope. The latter interpretation is not even an event, much less a

telic event. Yet one would like to treat the argument structure properties of both interpretations

25
in terms of a common solution. Thus it appears necessary to admit not only atelic resultatives, but

stative resultatives.

Let us see how these data follow immediately from the treatment of resultative semantics in

14/16. It has often been observed in the literature that the telicity of motion events correlates

with (among other things) the end-boundedness of the path of motion (Jackendoff, 1996 and

references therein). For instance, the PP into the room expresses a path that terminates in the

room; and John went into the room expresses a telic event, i.e. one that comes to its conclusion

when John is in the room. By contrast, the PP along the river expresses a path whose end is not

specific; and John went along the river expresses an atelic event, i.e. one whose termination is not

specific. This correlation is brought out explicitly in the formalism of motion and change in

Jackendoff 1996: in this formalism, the time-course of an event of change is homomorphic to the

structure of the path of change, in particular preserving end-boundedness. In turn, the telicity of

an event amounts precisely to the end-boundedness of its time-course.

Now consider the account of the semantics of path resultatives in 16. The constructional

subevent is the ‘main event’ in the semantic structure. As a consequence, its temporal structure

determines the telicity of the sentence. Its final argument, the RP, corresponds to the path of

motion. Since the end-boundedness of the RP determines the telicity of the constructional

subevent, and the telicity of the constructional subevent determines the telicity of a resultative

sentence, we derive directly the correlation observed in 24. Similarly, expressions like hotter and

hotter arguably denote an unbounded path of change in the ‘hot direction’; hence when used as

RP they too will result in atelic sentences like 23.

26
 Next let us consider the statives. In general, a stative or ‘extension’ interpretation of an

erstwhile motion verb is possible when the theme is an object idealized as extended in one

dimension, i.e. as an ‘elaborated line.’ The meaning of the ‘extension’ interpretation is that the

theme, rather than moving along the path, occupies the entire extent of the path. 16 For example,

the road goes along the river asserts not that the road travels but that the road occupies a linear

space parallel to and nearby the river. In the formalism of Jackendoff (1996), this is because in an

extension interpretation, the theme rather than the time-course is homomorphic to the structure of

the path, and there is no inherent time-course. In turn, the absence of an inherent time-course is

what makes a sentence stative.17

The stative interpretations in 25 fall under this generalization: the themes are the road and

the rope, and these are asserted to be extended over the paths expressed by down the hill and

over the pulley respectively. This is exactly what is expected under the semantic analysis in 16:

like ordinary verbs of motion, the resultative construction can be coerced into an extension

reading, given the right choice of subject.

Some other aspects of the extension interpretation are worthy of note. First, the verb in a

path resultative often expresses manner of motion. But this cannot be true of zigzag in 25a, since

there is no motion. Rather, the verb expresses the detailed shape of the path: at the coarsest

idealization, the path just extends down the hill; but at the next level of detail it has a zigzag

shape. This analysis can actually be applied just as well to the motion interpretation: zigzagging

consists in traversing a zigzag-shaped path. Similarly, in 25b,c the verb is interpreted as a manner

of motion (or better, manner of adopting a shape), brought about by application of force. But on

the extension interpretation it is interpreted as maintenance of shape under application of force.

27
In other words, when the resultative sentence becomes stative, the verbal subevent must be

interpreted statively as well.18 In addition, consider the transitive stative resultative in 25c.

Causation in this interpretation does not involve change but rather forced maintenance of a state –

just like the causation with ordinary verbs in sentences like 26.

(26) a. The weights made the rope stretch over the pulley.

b. The weights kept the rope stretched over the pulley.

The overall generalization is:

(27) The aspectual structure of the constructional subevent controls the aspectual

structure of the resultative sentence; in turn, the aspectual structure of the

constructional subevent is predictable from general principles correlating event

structure with change, extension, motion, and paths.

Thus our account of resultatives is in this respect also explanatory.

4.2. Temporal relation of the two subevents. Next let us turn to the temporal relation between

the two subevents of the resultative. On the analysis in 14/16, the verbal subevent is a means

toward the constructional subevent. To do X by means of doing Y, one cannot do X first and

then do Y. Thus this correctly predicts that the constructional subevent may not entirely precede

the verbal subevent when the latter is interpreted as the means of effecting the former.

This prediction leaves open whether the verbal subevent is concurrent with the

constructional subevent, overlaps with it, or entirely precedes it. All of these options are possible
28
with means expressions in general, depending on the pragmatics of the situation. Examples are

provided in 28:

(28) a. Cause cotemporal with effect:

Bill made the ball go up the hill by pushing it.

b. Cause overlaps with inception of effect:

Bill made the vase fall on the floor by knocking against it.

c. Cause completely precedes effect:

Bill made himself get sick on Tuesday by eating mushrooms on Monday.

The first two are clearly possible with transitive resultatives, as predicted:

(29) a. Cause cotemporal with effect:

Bill pushed the ball up the hill.

b. Cause overlaps with inception of effect:

Bill knocked the vase onto the floor.

It is not clear whether the temporal relation in 28c, in which the means entirely precedes

the main event, is an option for resultatives. Goldberg (1995:194) and Rappaport Hovav and

Levin (2001) observe that a temporal delay is not available with transitive resultatives generally.

For example, it is not possible to utter 30a to mean that Sam cut his finger, which caused his

captors to release him in order to clean him up. Such a sense is possible in 30b, for instance.

Instead, 30a must mean that the cutting directly and immediately released him from his (implicit)

restraints.
29
 (30) a. Sam cut himself free.

b. Sam got free (at 6:00) by cutting his ropes (at 4:00).

This restriction is in fact expected. Fodor (1970) observes that biclausal causatives permit a means

expression in which the means entirely precedes the main event. This is the case in 28c, for

instance, as well as examples like 31a. However, Fodor points out that monoclausal causatives

such as 31b do not permit such a temporal relation (for possible reasons, see McCawley,

1978:Jackendoff 1990, 150-151):

(31) a. Sue made Bill die on Thursday by poisoning his breakfast on Wednesday.

b. * Sue killed Bill on Thursday by poisoning his breakfast on Wednesday.

On the analysis in 14/16, resultatives are syntactically monoclausal, and the verbal subevent

functions semantically like a means expression. Hence, whatever the reason for the temporal

constraint on means expressions in monoclausal sentences, this constraint ought to apply to

resultatives as well.

Hovav Rappaport and Levin (2001) suggest that it is possible to have a time delay with the

unselected object cases, citing the following example.

(32) Sam sang enthusiastically during the class play. He woke up hoarse the next day and said,

‘Well, I guess I’ve sung myself hoarse.’ (RH&L: 775)

30
In the case of unselected objects, the verb by definition does not have a patient argument itself—

e.g., in 32 there is no entity that the singing actually directly acts upon. This would seem to allow

for instances in which the action designated by the verb does not cause the result directly or

immediately. Still, we feel that 32 is interpreted to mean that Sam only notices his throat

becoming hoarse after a time delay. It is still inferable that the injury to his throat had been

initiated by the time the singing ended.19

Evidence for the predictive power of our analysis comes from a consideration of

sound-emission resultatives. Note for instance that in The door banged open, the banging can be

at the end of the opening, say as the door strikes the adjacent wall. If the temporality restrictions

observed above were a stipulation on resultatives, rather than falling out of the independently

needed facts about the semantic relationship between verbal and constructional subevents, this

outcome would not be predicted. However, this possibility follows automatically from 20, our

treatment of the semantics of sound-emission resultatives. Here, unlike other resultatives, the

verbal subevent (banging) is a result of the constructional subevent (coming open) rather than a

means to it. Thus the general constraint on causation requires that the banging cannot precede the

opening, precisely the correct outcome.

To summarize, we find that the temporal relations between the verbal subevent and the

constructional subevent are predicted by three independently necessary factors: (1) the semantic

relation between the two subevents, whether it be means or result, (2) our pragmatic world

knowledge of the particular subevents in question, (3) the strong tendency to interpret means

expressions in monoclausal events as cotemporal. In short,

31
(33) The semantics and syntax of resultatives explain the possibilities for temporal

relations between the two subevents.

5. World knowledge relating to the semantics of the resultative explains additional

distributional facts

We have already seen that the semantic properties of resultatives explain much of their

syntax and their aspectual/temporal properties. The distribution of resultatives is also constrained

by general effects of world knowledge as it relates to the semantics of resultatives. For example,

our taxonomy in section 2 distinguished transitives with fake reflexives from other unselected

transitive resultatives: example 34a has no counterpart with a non-reflexive object (cf. 34b), while

the examples in 35a do (cf. 35b).

(34) a. Bill cried himself to sleep. [fake reflexive]

b. * Bill cried Sue to sleep.

(35) a. Bill wiggled himself through the hole. [ordinary reflexive]

Bill sang himself to sleep.

b. Bill wiggled the puppet through the hole.

Bill sang Sue to sleep.

However, this distinction requires no grammatical stipulation because it arises from our world

knowledge of what is likely to cause what. It’s hard to imagine making someone else go to

sleep by crying (the putative meaning of 34b); whereas it is of course possible to make something

else wiggle someplace and to make someone else go to sleep by singing (the meanings of 35b).

Thus there seems little reason to distinguish fake reflexives as a grammatically special case of
32
resultatives; the semantic requirement that the verbal subevent must be construed to be the means

of effecting the event designated by the construction requires such a causal relationship be

pragmatically plausible.

Another contrast that falls out from the relation between the subevents concerns the

following examples:

(36) a. *The elevator creaked itself to the ground.

b. If the telephone rang, it could ring itself silly. (Rappaport Hovav and Levin 2001:

ex. 34b)

The sound emission resultative (20) applies only to intransitive sentences, as in The elevator

creaked to the ground. Hence, despite the fact that the verbs in 36 are sound emission verbs, it

cannot apply here. What possibilities are left? The verb creak cannot be used causatively: *Bill

creaked the elevator. Therefore, the only applicable resultative pattern for 36a is the unselected

transitive resultative, which would have to mean ‘the elevator made itself go to the ground by

creaking’, which is pragmatically implausible. The same pattern applied to 36b is pragmatically

plausible, under the metaphorical interpretation in which the phone is animate and therefore can

get ‘silly’: ‘the phone could make itself silly by ringing’. Alternatively, since ring can also be

used causatively (Bill rang the doorbell), the selected transitive pattern is available as well: ‘the

phone could make itself silly by ringing itself’. Both these interpretations seem plausible. An

interpretation that does not emerge is ‘the elevator made itself go to the ground, thereby emitting

creaks’, ‘the telephone could make itself get silly, thereby emitting rings’, a plausible but

nonexistent extension of the sound emission resultative to transitive frames.

33
6. How arguments are shared between the two subevents

So far we have ignored the effects of the verbal subevent on the resultative, other than the

fact that it supplies the overt verb in the syntax. Now we return to an issue set aside in section 3:

how the semantic arguments of the verb are related to the semantic arguments of the construction.

6.1. Argument Realization. Let us turn more directly to the issue of argument sharing between

the verbal and constructional subevents. Our hypothesis can be stated as 37:

(37) Full Argument Realization (FAR)

All the arguments obligatorily licensed by the verb and all the syntactic arguments licensed

by the construction must be simultaneously realized in the syntax, sharing syntactic

positions if necessary in order to achieve well-formedness.20

An argument is considered obligatorily licensed by a verb if and only if an expression involving the

verb in active, simple past tense without the argument is illformed. For example, drink’s second

argument is not obligatory because 38 is well-formed; break’s patient argument, on the other

hand, is obligatory, because 39 is illformed:

(38) She drank.

(39) *She broke. [in the sense ‘she broke it/something’]

34
 The two of us differ on the nature of the conditions enforcing well-formedness. For AG,

illformed structures cannot occur because there is no combination of lexical and phrasal

constructions of English that licenses them. For RJ, they cannot occur because the general rules

of English syntax and argument linking, interacting with the verb’s lexical entry, do not license

them. The difference stems from whether one wishes to assume that all aspects of grammar can

be captured by constructions (AG) or whether one wants to preserve a role for traditional syntax

and argument linking that is non-constructional (RJ). Since we wish to emphasize what is shared

between our approaches, we leave this issue aside.

Let us work through a few examples. Consider first 40.

(40) Willy watered the plants flat.

The verb water is obligatorily transitive, since *Willy watered is out. 21 Thus by Full Argument

Realization, both arguments of the verb must appear in the syntax in 40 – and they do. The

constructional subevent has three arguments: a causer (or agent) mapped into subject position, a

patient mapped into object position, and a predicate; Full Argument Realization demands that all

of these be expressed too. So we have a total of five arguments to be mapped into only three

syntactic positions. However, Full Argument Realization permits two of these to be shared, which

is in fact the case: Willy and the plants serve as arguments of both subevents and thereby have

multiple thematic roles.

Suppose instead that we tried to combine the same verbal subevent with a constructional

subevent such as ‘Willy made the ground become wet’. Then there would be two distinct patients
35
competing for the same syntactic position, one from the constructional subevent and one from the

verbal subevent. This is impossible in English: *Willy watered the plants the ground wet. The

reason is that there is only one syntactic position in the clause that a patient can map into. And

neither of these NPs can be omitted because of FAR. Therefore this combination of events can

only be expressed biclausally: Willy made the ground wet by watering the plants.

Suppose, however, that the verb is only optionally transitive, for instance drink (the beer),

and we again wish to combine it with a constructional subevent that has a different patient, say

‘make the pub dry’. This time FAR permits us to leave the verb’s patient implicit and express only

the construction’s patient, so we can get Dave drank the pub dry. Here the only shared argument

is Dave, which is agent in both subevents. Similarly, if the verb is intransitive, for instance laugh,

there is no patient in the verbal subevent, and the agent is shared with the constructional subevent,

as in The critics laughed the play off the stage. Thus Full Argument Realization accounts for

both selected and unselected variants of transitive resultatives. The analysis so far is summed up

by 41 (in a notation neutral between the authors’ somewhat different formalizations):

(41) Transitive resultatives

a. Selected transitive resultatives

Willy watered the plants flat.

Constructional subevent: Agent: Willy; Patient: the plants; Predicate: flat

Verbal subevent: Agent: Willy; Patient: the plants

2 arguments shared

b. Unselected transitive resultatives with optionally transitive verb

36
 Dave drank the pub dry.

Constructional subevent: Agent: Dave; Patient: the pub; Predicate: dry

Verbal subevent: Agent: Dave; Patient: implicit

1 argument shared

c. Unselected transitive resultatives with intransitive verb

The critics laughed the play off the stage

Constructional subevent: Agent: the critics; Patient: the play; Path: off the stage

Verbal subevent: Agent: the critics

1 argument shared

d. Impossible case

*Willy watered the plants the ground wet.

Constructional subevent: Agent: Willy; Patient: the ground; Predicate: wet

Verbal subevent: Agent: Willy; Patient: the plants

1 argument shared; no way to map two independent Patients into the same clause

Another sort of impossible case concerns a verb that requires an obligatory PP expressing a

path argument. Consider the contrast between walk and pad, both verbs of motion:

(42) a. Bill walked (around the room) for hours.

b. Bill padded *(around the room) for hours.

Pad obligatorily requires a path phrase, where walk does not. Now notice what happens when

these verbs are combined with the transitive property resultative construction:

37
(43) a. Bill walked himself into a coma.

Constructional subevent: Agent: Bill; Patient: himself; Property: into a coma

Verbal subevent: Agent/Theme: Bill; Path: implicit

1 argument shared

b. * Bill padded himself into a coma.

Constructional subevent: Agent: Bill; Patient: himself; Property: into a coma

Verbal subevent: Agent/Theme: Bill; Path: implicit

1 argument shared; violates FAR since Path phrase of pad must be overt 42b

c. * Bill padded himself into the room into a coma.

Constructional subevent: Agent: Bill; Patient: himself; Property: into a coma

Verbal subevent: Agent/Theme: Bill; Path: into the room

1 argument shared; no way to map Path PP and property PP into the same clause

(43b) is bad because the required Path argument of pad is not expressed, in violation of FAR;

(43c) is bad because two different Path arguments are competing for the same slot. 22

6.3. The Semantic Coherence Principle

An observation that emerges from 41 and 43 is that a shared argument has parallel thematic

roles in the two subevents: it is either Agent of both or Patient of both. This idea proves to be a

more general constraint on resultatives (and probably other VP constructions); it is stated by

Goldberg (1995) as a Semantic Coherence Principle:

(44) Principle of Semantic Coherence: roles of the construction (rC) and roles of the
38
 verb (rV) may only unify if they are semantically compatible; role rV and rC are

semantically compatible if and only if rV can be construed as an instance of rC.

The principle prevents incompatible roles from combining. For example, an agent role cannot

combine with a patient role. Note that the principle is stated as a constraint on the combination of

roles in a clause, not as a real world constraint on the referent of those roles. It is quite possible

for a single referent to be construed as both an agent and a patient, for example, when each role is

assigned by a distinct clause He captured the snake(patient), and the snake (agent) bit him, or via

a coreferential argument, e.g., He(agent) talked himself(patient) hoarse.

At the same time, the principle does not require that the role of the verb come pre-classified

as the same type of role as the constructional role it combines with. What is required is that the

role of the verb be construable as in instance of the role of the construction. For example, the

object of wipe is not necessarily affected or a ‘patient’ (cf. She wiped the table but it was still

dirty). However, it is potentially affected by the wiping and thus is construable as a patient. This

is what licenses expressions such as Sam wiped the table clean.

The principle of Semantic Coherence can be used to account for the following contrasts:

(45) a. *She yelled hoarse.

b. *Ted cried to sleep.

c. The tiger bled to death.

39
The construction required in 45 is the noncausal property resultative. The constructional

subevent is X BECOME Y; its first argument, which maps to subject position, is a patient (i.e.

something happens to X). However, the verbs yell and cry require an agent argument in subject

position (i.e. yelling and crying are something that X does). Since an agent role cannot be

construed as a type of patient, the combination of yell or cry and the noncausal property

resultative is illformed. Now note that it is the specific semantics of the verb that is important, not

just the general verb class that a verb belongs to. While both bleed and cry are verbs of bodily

function, the subject of bleed is a type of patient, since bleeding is something that happens to

someone, not something that a person or other being does. Thus Semantic Coherence correctly

predicts that bleed can readily appear in the noncausal property resultative construction, as in 45c.

Consider now the bodily functions of coughing, sneezing and yawning. The single

arguments of these verbs can be construed as patients, or perhaps more typically, as agents, since

coughing, sneezing, and yawning can be construed either as things that happen to us or as things

we do. As predicted, attested examples (from Google web search engine) exist with these verbs

used alternatively, intransitively 46a,b,c and with fake objects 47a,b,c:

(46) a. He coughed awake and we were all overjoyed, especially Sierra.

www.diabloii.net/tdl/stories/destiny2.shtml

b. the kittens yawned awake and played with the other young ...

www.geocities.com/mistacorjellicle/lifelove.html

c. Zoisite sneezed awake, rubbing his nose and cursing under his

breath. www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Dojo/9951/vaults/love1.html
40
(47) a. Patamon coughed himself awake on the bank of the lake where he and Gomammon had

their play. www.furnation.com/Furryden/NEW/Stories/Digi8.doc

b. Ron yawned himself awake. www.schnoogle.com/authors/jsawyer/SNW06.html

c. She sneezed herself awake as the leaf landed on her nose.

www.transcendzero.co.uk/halloween/hallowitches.htm

The Semantic Coherence Principle predicts just this variability.

At the same time, we acknowledge that the examples in 47 are somewhat more natural than those

in 46. We believe this results from the fact that coughing, sneezing, and yawning are more easily

construed as actions that we do rather than actions that happen to us. We also recognize that

examples found on the web must be used with caution, since it is often unclear whether the author

is a native speaker, a typo was involved, etc. But dozens of instances of the types of examples in

46 were found; we take this as a clear indication that the requisite construals are possible.

The noncausative spatial resultative has slightly different properties. Consider the

examples Sue ran down the stairs vs. The water ran down the stairs. The subject of run is a theme

in both cases. In the former case it is also always an agent. But in the latter case the subject can

be interpreted as either doing something (i.e. an agent) or having something happen to it (i.e. a

patient). In other words, run with an inanimate subject is indifferent as to whether its subject is an

agent or a patient. In fact this is the case with many intransitive motion verbs. Given that the

intransitive spatial resultative is based on the model of intransitive motion verbs, we believe the
41
same distribution of thematic roles obtains with the GO in the constructional subevent of the

intransitive spatial resultative.

The consequence is that intransitive spatial resultatives are more liberal than intransitive

property resultatives in the range of verbs they admit. So we find both 48a, where the subject of

wriggle is an agent, and 48b, where the subject of melt is a patient.

(48) a. The worm wriggled onto the carpet.

b. The chocolate melted onto the carpet. 23

Both are compatible with Semantic Coherence: 48a with the agentive reading of GO, and 48b

with the nonagentive reading of GO.

In the transitive spatial resultatives, the situation is again different. The semantics of the

constructional subevent is X CAUSE [Y GO Path]. X, which maps into the subject, has to be an

agent; Y, which maps into the object, has to be patient. The consequence is that resultatives are

more acceptable to the degree that the subject can be understood as instigating the motion of the

object in the verbal subevent. This consideration is especially interesting when the object is a

reflexive, as in 49a,c,d,e.

(49) a. Bill wiggled himself loose.

b. Aliza wiggled her tooth loose.

c. The mechanical doll wiggled itself loose. [mechanical doll can instigate wiggling]

d. The off-center spinning flywheel shook itself loose.

42
 [flywheel’s spinning can instigate shaking]

c. *The ball wiggled itself loose. [ball cannot independently instigate wiggling]

In the case of 49a, b, the subject argument is clearly volitional and agentive. The subject

arguments in 49c and 49d are also construable as instigating the wiggling—i.e., are construable as

agents. Only in 49e is the ball unable to be construed as instigating its own wiggling action—

therefore 49e is incompatible with the Semantic Coherence principle and is unacceptable. Thus

Semantic Coherence, motivated here by the standard examples in 41 and 43, additionally helps

explain many otherwise mysterious constraints on resultatives (see also Takami 1998 for a related

constraint). A further application of Semantic Coherence is discussed in the following section.

To sum up so far, it appears that all the acceptable classes of resultatives observe the

conditions of Full Argument Realization and Semantic Coherence. The two principles together

account for a great deal of the distributional data. In addition, we have posited that ‘the’

resultative is actually a family of constructions, clearly closely related, but each subject to its own

restrictions on verb classes and with its own special syntactic and semantic properties. The

specifics need to be accounted for by any theory. Our choice is to formulate the analysis as

directly as possible in terms of the mappings between form and meaning.

7. Extending the Analysis to Additional Types of Resultatives

7.1. Follow-cases We next consider the follow-type cases introduced in section 2. These are

distinguished from everything we have looked at so far by the fact that they are transitive

expressions, but the subject rather than the object is host of the RP. Semantically they fall into

two subtypes (many of these examples are adapted from Rappaport Hovav and Levin 2001).
43
(50) Object determines subject’s path of motion, either by its own motion or by traces it leaves

a. Bill followed the thief into the library. (Thief’s motion determines Bill’s path)

b. Bill tracked the leak to its source. (Path of leak’s outflow determines Bill’s path)

c. Bill traced the clues to the haunted house. (Distribution of clues determines Bill’s

path)

Transitive noncausative spatial resultatives

(51) Object is vehicle

a. Bill took the train to New York.

b. Sara caught a plane to New York.

c. Ann rode a limo to the hotel.

Object is path of motion

d. Bill took/traveled the Taconic Parkway to New York.

e. Chris rode the Oregon Trail to Kansas.

f. Ray flew the coastal route to Buffalo.

44
 What makes these cases semantically different from previous transitive resultatives is that,

while the direct object is an argument of the verb, it is not a patient: one is not acting on the thief,

the leak, or the clues in 50, nor on the various vehicles and paths in 51. Thus these verbs cannot

combine with the normal causative resultative construction, which marks the object as a patient:

that would violate Semantic Coherence. In many cases, it would also mean something bizarre,

e.g. ?? ‘Bill made the leak go to its source by tracking it’, *‘Ray made the coastal route go to

Buffalo by flying (it)’. So some different means of mapping these sentences to semantics must be

invoked.

We can envisage two alternative approaches. One claims that the constructions involve a

transitive variant of the noncausative resultative construction, which is normally intransitive; the

other involves positing new transitive subconstructions. We sketch the two approaches in turn.

The first possibility for the follow cases is to treat them as a variant of the noncausative

motion construction 16b (e.g. Bill rolled into the room): they entail that the subject argument

moves along a path, just as noncausal motion expressions do generally. On this view, the direct

object argument can be viewed as an argument of the verb alone; it is not an argument of the

constructional subevent. In other words, unlike previous cases, the verbal subevent has two

arguments, only one of which is shared with the constructional subevent.

(52) Transitive noncausative resultative construction

Syntax: NP1 V NP2 PP3

Semantics: X1 GO Path3
45
 MEANS: [VERBAL SUBEVENT: X1 GO [PATH DETERMINED BY Y2]]

This construction requires a spatial resultative, not a property resultative. The selectional

restriction on the verbal subevent, PATH DETERMINED BY Y2 , generalizes the separate cases in 50-

51. In each of these cases, the subject traverses a path determined by the object; but they differ in

exactly how the object determines this path. This selectional restriction has the effect of ruling

out certain other cases that have the same relation between subevents, for instance 53a, with the

plausible meaning ‘she went into the room by pushing the door’, as well as examples like 53b,

with the implausible meaning ‘we got into the building by noticing the thieves.’

(53) a. She pushed the door into the room

(≠ ‘she went into the room by pushing the door)

b. * We noticed the thieves into the room.

According to 52, these are out because the direct objects do not determine the path of the subject.

Whether this is the correct restriction or too narrow awaits the discovery of further cases. Finally,

54a is ruled out because sniff cannot be construed as a verb of motion, and 54bis ruled out

because run is not a transitive verb as required by 52.

(54) a. *The dog sniffed the trail into the yard.

( = the dog went into the yard by sniffing the trail)

b. *The dog ran the clues into the yard

( = *the dog went into the yard by running the clues)

46
 An alternative account of these cases might posit additional constructional subevents such

as the following:

(55) Syntax: NP1 V NP2 PP3

Semantics: X1 GO-AFTER Y2 Path3

INSTANCE: [VERBAL SUBEVENT] e.g., follow, track, trace

(56) Syntax: NP1 V NP2 PP3

Semantics: X1 GO-BY WAY OF Y2 Path3

INSTANCE:[VERBAL SUBEVENT] e.g., take

OR MEANS: [VERBAL SUBEVENT] e.g., ride, sail, drive

We observed in section 3 that constructions generally need to specify the possible range of

semantic relationships between verb and construction (e.g., MEANS or RESULT). In the case of

55 and 56, a different relationship between the verbal subevent and the constructional subevent is

indicated by the predicate, INSTANCE. That is, the verbs in 50 and 51 have meanings that

closely resemble the semantics of the constructions: e.g., the verb follow designates a specific

instance of the more general meaning ‘X goes after Y along a Path;’ take as used in 51d

designates an instance of the more general ‘X goes by way of Y along Path.’ Goldberg (1997)

proposes that cases in which the verbal subevent is simply an instance or an elaboration of the

constructional subevent are the most prototypical case, both for particular constructions and

cross-linguistically.

In the case of the construction represented in 55, the only acceptable relationship between
47
verb and constructional subevent is the instance relation. Notice MEANS and RESULT are not

acceptable:

(57) a. *The dog sniffed the trail into the yard.

( = the dog followed the trail into the yard by sniffing it– MEANS)

b. *The dog ran the clues into the yard.

( = the dog followed the clues into the yard by running – MEANS)

c. *The dog found her into the yard.

( = the dog went after her into the yard thereby finding her – RESULT)

In the case of the construction represented in 56, it is possible to use a verb that designates the

MEANS of going by way of a vehicle or path as in the following examples:

(58) a. Bill rode a train to New York. (Bill went to NY by way of a train by riding the train)

b. Bill drove the Taconic Parkway to New York. (Bill went to NY by way of the TP by

driving)

48
 The semantic representations in 55 and 56 capture the semantic properties of the follow

subclasses and make two additional predictions. For ease of exposition, we refer to the Y2

argument of 55 as a ‘sought-after’ role and the Y2 argument of 56 as a ‘route’ role. First, these

representations insure that this class is only productive with verbs that can be construed to involve

agent/theme and, if they have a second obligatory role, it must be construable as either a ‘sought-

after’ or a ‘route’ type role. As expected in accord with the Semantic Coherence principle, other

verbs cannot integrate with these semantic templates, as seen in 53b (*We noticed the thieves into

the room). Secondly, the representations predict that only path phrases and not change of state

resultatives apply to the follow subclasses. This prediction is borne out:

(59) a. *We drove Highway 5 silly.

b. *We followed the trail silly.

Moreover, the linking patterns between syntax and semantics specified in 55 and 56 are

independently required. That the first argument of GO should be expressed by a subject is familiar

from intransitive motion verbs such as run, walk, jog, jump. That the path argument should be

expressed by a PP is also expected. In addition, the expression of the ‘sought-after’ and ‘route’

roles as direct object in 55 and 56 is also independently required for other verbs. For example,

the direct objects of seek and need are naturally described as bearing a role that can be described

as ‘sought-after’;24 the arguments of climb and pave arguably involve ‘route’ type arguments.

Thus additional constructions may be required, but the semantic structure is required for verbs

like follow and the relevant sense of take, and each aspect of the syntax is also independently

needed for other verbs.25

49
 In any case, it is clear that something special needs to be said to account for these cases,

since they are transitive but noncausal, unlike all the other examples discussed so far. Our

suggestion is to posit additional subconstructions that are minimally different from the other,

independently required constructions. 26

7.2 Dancing Mazurkas. The examples in 60 are somewhat different again from what we have

seen so far.

(60) Verb+object together form a predicate

a. Martha danced mazurkas across the room.

b. The kids played leapfrog across the park.

c. John did cartwheels through the crowd.

We note first that these are somewhat less acceptable than 61, where there is no NP object. They

are also much better than 62, where the object has some structure beyond a bare NP.

(61) a. Martha waltzed across the room.

b. The children leapfrogged across the park.

c. John cartwheeled through the crowd.

(62) a. ?? Martha danced mazurkas by Chopin across the room.

b. ?? The children played games of leapfrog across the park.

c. ?? John did impressive cartwheels through the crowd.

50
Our sense is that in 60 the verb plus object together form a sort of complex predicate. Once the

object comes to be identified by anything other than its role in the subject’s action – that is, once

the object becomes referential, as in 62– the resultative is unacceptable. The complex predicate

analysis of these cases can be used to explain why these examples fail to passivize (Visser 1963-

1973; RH&L 2001)—the postverbal NP is not a direct object but part of a complex predicate. 27

However this distinction may be formalized, at worst it has to be added to 16b, the noncausative

path resultative, as another type of possible verbal subevent.28

7.3 Spit cases. Our last case is the spit-type examples introduced in section 2.

(63) Intransitive resultatives with implicit (i.e. non-subject) host

a. Bill spit/urinated/ejaculated/coughed/sneezed out the window.

b. Bill sweated/bled on the floor.

c. The toilet leaked through the floor into the kitchen below.

d. Bill ate off the floor.

e. Bill drank from the hose.

We note that the examples in 63 do superficially fit the criteria for resultatives – the spit ends up

outside the window, the sweat ends up on the floor, and so on. These are interesting because they

appear to violate Full Argument Realization. That is, while the verbs do not require the entity in

motion to be expressed, the causative resultative construction normally does. So these cases are

potential counterexamples to our analysis.

51
 However, consider 64.

(64) a. Bill entered/left/exited the room) through the bathroom window.

b. Bill crossed (the street) to our side.

c. The cream rose to the top.

The verbs in 64 express inherent paths: one cannot enter without going into something, exit

without going out of something, cross without passing from one side to the other of something,

or rise without going in an upward direction. But it is always possible to add a PP that further

delineates the path, even when not selected by the verb. Jackendoff (1990:170-171, 280)

formalizes this possibility as what in present terms might be called ‘the PP adjunct path

construction.’ What is important in the present context is that the construction only serves to

modify or amplify an argument of the verbal event, namely the path.

Now return to the verbs in 63. They all express some entity or substance in motion, but in

these cases the entity is implicit. In addition, like the verbs in 64, the entity or substance in

motion has a specified path: in 63a,b,c,f out of or away from the subject, in 63d,e into the subject.

The PP simply further delineates the path, just as in 64. Therefore these examples can be

produced by the PP-adjunct path construction rather than the resultative. This means that there is

no constructional subevent whose theme argument (the entity in motion) must be expressed to

satisfy Full Argument Realization.

On the other hand, there are other examples of this type in which the verb does not imply

any necessary entity in motion:

52
 (65) Bill coughed/sneezed on the mirror.

It is quite possible to cough or sneeze expelling only air. No motion trajectory is normally

specified with these verbs. Therefore there is no necessary path implied by the verb that the PP

can amplify. So an alternate approach would be to recognize a construction in the grammar that

allows a highly inferable theme argument to be unexpressed for certain classes of verbs (namely

verbs of bodily emission, ingestion and contribution). The construction would specify that a

particular semantic argument need not be overtly expressed, a specification required anyway for

the passive and middle constructions (see Goldberg, to appear-b).

While the present account explicitly recognizes a family of related constructions in order to

account for the evident semantic variability, it may seem that other approaches yield greater

generalizations. However, few accounts have even attempted to account for the full range of data

discussed here. One recent exception that does discuss most if not all of the types of examples

explored here is Rappaport Hovav and Levin (2001). But a close look at RH&L’s account reveals

that resultatives are classified in an extremely heterogenous fashion. The account is based on a

distinction in which certain resultatives are claimed to involve simple event structure and others

are based on complex event structure. In their Appendix B, RH&L classify the examples in 66

as having simple event structure, where simple event structure is defined such that the verbal and

constructional subevents unfold at the same time (2001: 793-794).29

(66) a. The pond froze solid.

53
 b. Robin danced out of the room.

c. We pulled the crate out of the water.

d. The wise men followed the star out of Bethlehem.

They classify the examples in 67 as having complex event structure in which two subevents need

not be cotemporal:

(67) a. The joggers ran the pavement thin.

b. We yelled ourselves hoarse.

c. They drank the pub dry.

d. The cows ate themselves sick.

e. The critics panned the play right out of town.

Note that 66 includes intransitives 66a,b as well as transitives 66c,d, and the latter have both

object hosts 66c and subject hosts 66d. All of the examples in 67 have object hosts, but so does

66c. 67(a-d) are unselected transitive resultatives, but 67e, like 66c, is a selected transitive

resultative. RH&L suggest that all of the examples in 66 are noncausative where as all of the

examples in 67 are causal. But it is unclear why 66c is considered noncausative: notice it is

naturally paraphrased by ‘we caused the crate to move out of the water by pulling,’ and it is

expressed transitively with agent and patient arguments. Thus it is hard to see any natural division

among resultatives that is captured by the notion of temporal dependence in RH&L’s sense. In

fact this notion only distinguishes ‘fake reflexive’ property resultatives from intransitive property

resultatives, a generalization that accounts for only a proper subset of data from 66 and 67.

Other syntactic attributes of resultatives, such as their overt transitivity, and particular semantic
54
properties other than the temporal one on which the account is based, are not addressed. Neither

do previous general analyses attempt to account for the partial productivity that is strikingly

present in the resultative. We address this issue in the following section.

8. On the productivity of the resultative constructions

We have already seen that in order to account for the full range of data, it is necessary to

posit minimally distinct constructions. As noted above, the family of constructions required is

akin to the type of families that are familiar from derivational morphology, as well as from non-

linguistic categorization. Also parallel to morphological processes is the partially productive

nature of the resultative. What we find are areas of productivity with many diverse pockets of

idiosyncrasy.

Spatial resultatives appear to be totally productive, within constraints posed by the meaning

of the construction. In English, any spatial PP that can be construed as a path can be used as RP,

whether it be telic or atelic 68a, b complex or simple 69a, b, goal directed or source directed

70a,b:

(68) a. Pat ran into the room.

b. Pat ran towards the room.

(69) a. Pat ran down the hall out the door into the alley.

b. Pat ran outside.

55
(70) a. Pat ran to the river.

b. Pat ran from the river.

APs such as free (of NP), clear (of NP), apart, open, and shut are also fairly freely productive

within the semantic constraints imposed by the construction. These adjectives can arguably be

interpreted as spatial configurations with some force-dynamic overtones:

(71) a. Willy wiggled/squirmed/pried free/loose (of the ropes).

b. Judy jumped/leaped/skated/slid clear of the rocks.

c. The bottle broke/spilled/fell/smashed open.

Willy ends up in a position in space where the ropes don’t constrain him, and Judy ends up in a

position in space where the rocks can’t injure her. Likewise, being open is not only a property but

also a spatial configuration, affording free passage between the interior and exterior of the object;

being shut precludes such access. We therefore tentatively take these cases to be interpretable as

either property resultatives or spatial resultatives.

Turning our attention to property resultatives, we find a number of lexical resultatives such

as make, get, turn, and render (transitive), and become, turn, and get (intransitive), which are

quite productive and allow a broad range of predicates. Make, render, and become in particular

allow predicate NPs as well as APs (e.g. make him president, render him a nonentity, become a

pariah). In Boas’s (2003) search of the 10-million-word British National Corpus, some adjectives

such as wet, sleepy, brown, and dirty appear as RPs only with lexical resultative verbs. Below are

additional cases drawn from Boas’ Appendix A, which enumerates which verbs appear with which
56
RPs; many form minimal pairs. Note that the list of adjectives that can appear freely as property

RPs with inherently nonresultative verbs is quite limited (Goldberg, 1995; Green, 1972; Takami,

ms; Wechsler, 2001).

(72) fairly productive as RP RP only with inherently resultative verbs

dry wet

awake sleepy

black brown

clean dirty

flat thick

thin fat

straight crooked

smooth rough

sick ill

full empty

dead famous

silly safe

stupid calm

hoarse tired

As noted above, some verbs that are lexical resultatives are more constrained than

resultatives formed productively. Some inherently resultative verbs lexically specify a semantic

restriction on the RP, while not specifying its exact form. For example, both pry (transitive) and

come (intransitive) can only appear with RPs that express a semantic notion that corresponds
57
roughly with ‘apart’:

(73) He pried it apart/open/loose/free/*flat/*straight.

(74) It came apart/open/loose/free/*flat/*straight.

Similarly, section 3 mentioned the verb drive, which in its resultative use selects only predicates

denoting negative and extreme mental states: drive NP crazy/nuts/bananas/to desperation/to

drink/up the wall/meshuga/ frantic but not *drive NP happy/sick/silly/clean/calm/ thin/sober.

Again, most of the RPs that are good with drive occur only with it and with make and go. The

apparently productive choice of APs in the resultative often boils down to occurrence with one of

these inherently resultative verbs.

As is often the case with phrasal constructions, there exist idioms that pattern like the

general construction. A good example of an idiom with resultative form is drink NP under the

table, which patterns like a spatial resultative, but has a specialized meaning and a rigid choice of

lexical items. There also exist cases such as those in 75, where the choice of verb is quite broad,

but the object and the RP are fixed. In all cases, the meaning is approximately ‘do V to excess’

75(a-c) from Jackendoff 1997b; 75d from (Boas, 2003).

(75) a. She talked/sang/cooked/knitted/programmed her head/butt/tush off.

b. She talked/sang/cooked/knitted/programmed her heart out.

c. She talked/sang/cooked/knitted/programmed up a storm.

d. She talked/sang/cooked/knitted/programmed herself blue in the face.

58
Here the idiom is the combination of the object and the RP.30 Somewhere in this mix also falls She

worked/wore/knitted/?typed her fingers to the bone.

There are heavy and apparently idiosyncratic constraints on the choice of property APs

and on the combinations of APs with verbs. Examples 76-77 give a little of the flavor of this

problem.

(76) a. ? Amy ran herself weary.

b. * Amy ran herself exhausted.

(77) Amy ran herself to exhaustion.

There are some generalizations about which APs are more productive. For example, more

productive APs tend to be nongradable, and when used as RPs strongly tend to encode a clearly

delimited state. Consider the contrast between dry, which is quite productive as an RP, and wet,

which is not. Things are either dry or not dry--it is odd to refer to them as ‘a little dry’; on the

other hand, things can be more or less wet. Similarly, someone is either awake or not awake,

while someone can be more or less sleepy.31 Recognizing that the class of property AP RPs is

limited in a principled way allows us to account for a great many examples that are illformed, e.g.:

(78) He danced himself to fame/*famous (Verspoor 1997:119)

(79) We danced ourselves to dust/*dusty. (Boas, 2003:257)

Famous and dusty are gradable adjectives and it is quite natural to say someone is ‘a little famous’

or ‘a little dusty.’
59
 Another restriction on property RPs concerns those coded as PPs. It turns out that PPs

that correspond to acceptable APs are for the most part impossible as RPs:

(80) a. He danced his feet sore.

b. *He danced his feet to soreness. (Verspoor 1997:119)

(81) a. Denny Butler nearly crushed you flat. (British National Corpus, cited by Boas 2000:

257)

b. *Denny Butler nearly crushed you to flatness. (Boas 2000:257)

(82) a. He talked himself hoarse.

b. *He talked himself to hoarseness.

This is on the face of it surprising, given that PP RPs are generally more productive than AP RPs.

An explanation for the illformedness of the above PP RPs is that they are blocked or preempted

by the highly conventional verb + AP forms.32 In order to invoke blocking, it is necessary to

recognize that the preempting forms are stored in the mental lexicon, a recognition that is central

to the present approach. This is another virtue of the constructional approach, since

conventionalized resultative expressions are assumed to be stored as subregularities along with

the more generalized constructions.

The choice of possible RPs is often highly dependent on the main verb involved (Verspoor

1992; Goldberg 1995; Boas 2000). For example, in Boas’ large corpora search, the verbs stab,
60
bat, put, batter, frighten, crush, scare, burn only occur with the RP to death and never with dead.

Shoot on the other hand occurs with dead (408 times) compared with to death (11 times). This

difference has a semantic basis. Dead is used as an RP only when the endstate is an instantaneous

result of the action denoted by the verb. It is possible to shoot someone and cause them to die

instantly. If more than one shot is used, to death is preferable:

(83) Riddling him with 16 bullets, Billy Bob shot him to death/??dead.

(84) Firing a single bullet to the heart, Billy Bob shot him dead/?to death.

Most methods of killing (including stabbing, battering, frightening, crushing, and burning) are not

normally understood to cause instantaneous death; thus to death is preferred with the

corresponding verbs.

An apparently arbitrary restriction has been known for a long time (Green 1972; Carrier

and Randall 1992): the resultative excludes past participial adjectives as RP (85a) whereas more

or less synonymous PPs are acceptable (85b). We know of no convincing semantic explanation for

this restriction, particularly given the fact that the inherently resultative verbs do allow past

participial adjectives (85c).

(85) a. * He sang himself exhausted/bored/exhilarated.

b. He sang himself to exhaustion/to boredom/to (a state of) exhilaration.

c. He made himself exhausted/bored/exhilarated.

61
 Regardless of how these semi-systematic threads are accounted for, there remains a fairly

large dose of idiomaticity or conventionalization. For example, ill is a near synonym of sick and

yet is not nearly as felicitous as an RP:

(86) a. She ate herself sick

b. *She ate herself ill.

Asleep describes a normally non-gradable and clearly delimited state and yet it is far less

conventional as an RP than awake or to sleep:

(87) a. ?She cried herself asleep.

b. She cried herself to sleep.

c. She jerked herself awake.

In addition, it is not sufficient to simply tag adjectives in the lexicon as being possible RPs.

There must be a cross-referencing between verb and RP. For instance, despite the fact that crazy

is completely acceptable as an RP with drive, it is markedly odd with talk, even though an

interpretation is imaginable (Goldberg 1995:137):

(88) ?He talked himself crazy.

Other minimal pairs that do not readily admit of an explanation include the following.

(89) a. They stirred the paint smooth/*homogeneous.

62
 b. His pants wore thin/??threadbare/*rough.

c.They twirled themselves dizzy/*happy.

The view that is emerging is that the grammar contains the property resultative as an

overarching generalization; but particular subclasses, constrained in all sorts of different ways, are

learned individually (See also Boas 2000 and for a learning theory in which this is expected see

Tomasello, 2000, 2003). This may be an unappealing result to those committed to a maximally

general view of grammar, but we think it cannot be avoided. The fact of limited productivity is

already widely recognized in other corners of English grammar, for example in derivational

morphology (e.g., Chomsky, 1970; Janda and Joseph, 1999). The property resultatives provide a

parallel case in syntax.

At the same time, an approach that disallows any degree of productivity runs into just as

much trouble. For example, we feel Boas (2000, 2003) takes the implications of the semi-

idiosyncrasy of the resultative too far when he 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’

(2000: 301). We believe his own corpus data indicate that the construction is in fact partially

productive, in that there are many verbs that occur only once in the 10 million word corpus with a

particular RP. This is illustrated in Table 1:

[insert table 1 here]

63
If a particular verb only appears once in a 10 million word corpus with a particular property RP,

we feel it is safe to infer that the use of that verb with that RP is not likely a conventional fact

about the verb. The following provide a tiny sample of such examples, and we feel their novel

character is apparent:

(90) ‘Shadows cast by thin trees yawn and stretch themselves awake’‘After waiting two

years on the backburner for Batmania to boil itself dry…’‘Plus a recess above the nibs

allows the tiles to be stacked virtually flat’‘That the girls might be unaware of the camera

rather than seducing it to death’‘‘She held out her dish and Vi spooned it full.’‘…bloody

vultures overhead shitting themselves silly’‘Shouldering the door shut…’

Table 1 above includes only conventional RPs and the data collected only involves transitive

property resultatives. Including more novel RPs and intransitive resultatives would increase the

number of productive resultative expressions that much more.

64
 We wish to simply acknowledge that resultative constructions are partially, but not fully

productive. We do not attempt to provide a full explanation of conservative productivity here

(but see Baker, 1979; Brooks and Tomasello, 1999; Goldberg, 1995; Pinker, 1989 for discussion

and suggestions).

9. Conclusions

What does this corner of English tell us about the nature of the grammar? It tells us that

having a phrase structure rule V NP AP/PP does not tell us enough about the construction. We

see no choice but to treat the resultative construction as made up of a family of subconstructions,

united by related but not identical syntax and by related but not identical semantics. Moreover,

among the subconstructions are cases with only a single example, i.e. classical idioms. Like

classical idioms, resultative idioms have the syntax of the (more) productive class and share to

some degree in the semantics, yet have to be learned one by one.

We differ to some degree in our optimism that a learning theory capable of assimilating

these facts is imminent (RJ being less optimistic than AG). But we are in solid agreement that no

learning theory based purely on setting universal parameters (á la Principles and Parameters

theory) or purely on ranking universal violable constraints (á la Optimality Theory) is going to

come up with anything close to this pattern.

We have attempted here to offer a comprehensive, descriptively adequate account of

English resultatives. Section 3 posited four major subconstructions, repeated here Note that we

have folded the special cases of sound emission and disappearance resultatives into 97c.

65
(97) a. Causative property resultative

Syntax: NP1 V NP2 AP3

Semantics: X1 CAUSE [Y2 BECOME Z3]

MEANS: [VERBAL SUBEVENT]

b. Noncausative property resultative (e.g. The pond froze solid)

Syntax: NP1 V AP/PP2

Semantics: X1 BECOME Y2

MEANS: [VERBAL SUBEVENT]

c. Noncausative path resultative (‘intransitive motion construction’, e.g. The ball rolled

down the hill; the truck rumbled into the station)

Syntax: NP1 V PP2

Semantics: X1 GO Path2

i. MEANS: [VERBAL SUBEVENT]

ii. RESULT: [VERBAL SUBEVENT: X1 EMIT SOUND]

iii. RESULT: [VERBAL SUBEVENT: X1 DISAPPEAR]

66
 d. Causative path resultative (‘caused motion construction’, e.g. Bill rolled the ball

down the hill)

Syntax: NP1 V NP2 PP3

Semantics: X1 CAUSE [Y2 GO Path3]

MEANS: [VERBAL SUBEVENT]

We also offered two possible accounts of the follow subclasses in section 7.1, and two of

the spit on the floor examples in section 7.3; each of these involves adding further specialized

members to the family. Any treatment of resultatives has to account for the fact that they have the

range of forms and interpretations shown above. For a first approximation, a constructional

approach to resultatives says that the syntax-semantics interface of English contains this family of

four subconstructions in addition to the more general principles (or constructions!) that link the

semantic arguments of a verb to its syntactic arguments (via a thematic hierarchy or whatever).

Languages such as Spanish, Japanese and Hindi have far less general resultative constructions:

they allow only atelic path RPs combined with verbs that independently encode motion (Aske,

1989; Nakamura, 1997; Narasimhan, 1998; Takami, ms). It is clear that something about English

allows it to license resultatives with the particular range of interpretations that it does. The

generalizations in 97 capture what this something is.

Overall, it is clear that something must be stipulated in order to equip English with

resultative sentences. Perhaps the stipulation is some unusual syntactic structure involving small

clauses or the like (Hoekstra, 1988); but this syntactic structure must also come with rules of

interpretation that result in the interpretations in 97. Or perhaps the stipulation is a rule in the
67
lexicon that amplifies verbs’ argument structures (as in Levin and Rappaport Hovav, 1990 and

some versions of HPSG and LFG); if so, this rule must also specify the resulting meaning. Or

perhaps the stipulation is some extra principle of semantic interpretation or inference (as in von

Stechow, 1995); if so, this rule again must specify the special meaning. Even if some stipulation is

possible in the form of an abstract parameter that connects to other properties of the language

(Snyder, 2001), the grammar still must predict what the allowable forms and meanings of

resultative sentences are in English. In other words, something like the generalizations in 97

ultimately must be captured. The constructional approach simply states the generalizations

directly, thereby avoiding further complexities in (a) the syntax, (b) the lexical entries of verbs, or

(c) mappings from abstract parameters to grammatical properties.

We have demonstrated that a number of generalizations follow from our hypothesis. In

particular, the semantic argument structure of the constructional subevent determines the syntactic

argument structure of the sentence by general principles of argument linking. Similarly, the

aspectual structure of the constructional subevent controls the aspectual structure of the

resultative sentence; in turn, the aspectual structure of the constructional subevent is predictable

from general principles correlating event structure with change, extension, motion, and paths.

Finally, the semantics and syntax of resultatives explain the possibilities for temporal relations

between the two subevents. Using the semantics of the constructional subevent, the semantics of

the verbal subevent and the semantic relationship between the two, we were able to explain many

of the distributional properties of resultatives.

68
 We were able to prevent many further conceivable overgeneralizations by adopting the Full

Argument Realization and Semantic Coherence principles, which appear to apply generally to all

VP constructions such as the way-construction as well as the resultative.

Finally, it is important to recognize the limits of explanation. For instance, we have seen

that two unrelated classes of verbal subevents appear in construction 97cii, iii: sound-emission and

disappearance. It is unlikely that any general principles of syntax or semantics are going to

explain why these particular cases work and many other conceivable ones do not. We have shown

that there are pockets of productivity, but there is also a great deal of idiosyncrasy involved in the

resultatives, especially the property resultatives. Many idiosyncratic instances and small

subclasses of the construction must be learned and stored individually. So far as we can determine,

this pattern can be described only within a constructional approach to grammar. We leave it as a

challenge for practitioners of other approaches to develop comparably detailed accounts.

11
In the case of this construction, we assume that the constructional subevent is noncausal while

the relationship between the verbal subevent and constructional subevent is one of causation, as

indicated by MEANS.
12
Malka Rappaport Hovav (personal communication, June 2003) notes that light emission verbs

are sometimes possible. In fact, the following type of examples are fully acceptable:

i. The light flashed across the sky.

However, when light flashes, the flashes are not emitted by the light. Rather, flashing is

the MEANS of the light’s motion. As stated in (16b), the MEANS relation extends to all verb

classes. What appear not to be conventional are instances in which a verb that designates light

emission is used as an incidental side-effect or result of the motion.

69
13
Goldberg (1991, 1995) argues that the property resultatives are related to the path resultatives

by metaphorical extension insofar as the RP is interpreted as a metaphorical goal. This predicts

that AP resultatives are based on PP resultatives and that we should not expect to find languages

which have only AP resultatives and not PP resultatives. Jackendoff (1990) treats them as parallel

instantiations of thematic structure, differing in semantic field feature.

14
It is possible to demonstrate that the A-er and A-er pattern requires a special construction.

Note first that usually an adjective cannot conjoin with itself (i); only comparative adjectives can.

Second, conjoined comparatives can usually appear as the predicate of either states or events (ii),

but A-er and A-er can appear only as the predicate of an event (iii).

(i) The building is tall and wide/*tall and tall.

(ii) This building got/is taller and wider than that one.

(iii) This building got/*is taller and taller (*than that one).

Third, with longer adjectives we get more and more beautiful; ordinary conjoined

comparatives come out differently: more beautiful and (more) exciting. Thus at bottom the

construction appears to be a reduplication of the comparative morpheme. The meaning involves

some sort of quantification over successive stages, and is paralleled by the equally idiosyncratic

ever taller, ever more beautiful.

15
We abstract away here from factors such as indefinite plural subjects, which can independently

induce atelicity (People walked in for hours). See Jackendoff (1996).

16
This interpretation requires some suitable level of abstraction. For example, the telephone poles

run alongside the road means not that the road’s edge is covered with telephone poles, but that

the poles form a ‘virtual line’ that extends along the road. See Talmy (2000), Jackendoff (1990,

ch. 6); Langacker (1987).

70
17
Talmy (2000) treats such sentences as ‘fictive motion,’ as though one imagines oneself or one’s

gaze traveling the road and thereby traveling along the river. While this interpretation is

intuitively seductive, a full semantic analysis still must explain why sentences expressing extension

are stative rather than eventive, as far as we know an issue not addressed by Talmy. The stativity

is crucial to our analysis here

18
The relation between the two subevents must be reinterpreted as well, as ‘means’ is normally a

relation between two events rather than two states.

19
See Pustejovsky (1995) for further discussion and formalization of various possible temporal

relations among subevents.

20
This condition is proposed in slightly different form Goldberg (1995) as the Correspondence

Principle. In Goldberg (1995, to appear) it is argued that the Correspondence Principle is a

default principle that can be overridden by the specifications of particular constructions; e.g., the

passive construction specifically serves to allow a normally obligatory argument to be omitted.

Goldberg also suggests that particular constructions determine which arguments must be shared

between verb and construction and which can be contributed by the construction alone.

Jackendoff 1990 also has a formulation, which however deals only with the sharing of the subject

argument.
21
Goldberg (2000) discusses a particular construction that allows the patient argument of many

causal verbs to be omitted under special discourse conditions. This construction, termed the

‘Deprofiled Object Construction,’ can be used to account for special circumstances where water

can appear intransitively as in With three new greenhouses to take care of, the gardener had to

water all afternoon. Also in the context of two people gardening together, one could say to the

other: You weed and I’ll water.

71
22
An anonymous reviewer asks why Bill padded himself into/around the room is illformed.

Indeed, it should be possible for the construction to add a patient/theme role expressed as direct

object. In the case of a reflexive object, the interpretation required would be one involving a ‘split

self’: one’s superego acts on one’s ego (or however one wishes to describe the split-self scenerio).

As predicted, this is possible with certain intransitive motion verbs such as:

i. She marched herself out of the kitchen.

While it is pragmatically felicitous to force oneself to march somewhere, it is hard to

imagine why one’s superego would cause one’s ego to ‘pad’ somewhere. That it is just

pragmatically odd and not impossible is supported by the fact that we were able to google up the

following example, from a story in which a girl forces herself to walk quietly up the stairs with a

gun in her hand.

ii. She padded herself up the steps And knocked on the door, heart beating in her ...

www.geocities.com/applejax8831/mailcall.html

23
The causative of this example, the sun melted the chocolate onto the carpet, is semantically

parallel to Goldberg’s (1991) He broke the eggs into the bowl. Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1995

(60-61) cite the latter as a potential counterexample to their claim that there can only be one

delimiting state per clause, because the eggs both end up broken and end up in the bowl. They

take a stab at resolving this problem by saying the broken eggs are whole eggs and the eggs in the
72
bowl are only the eggs’ contents, so that the sentence covertly speaks of two different entitites

undergoing change. This story cannot be told in the present case: the same chocolate melts as

ends up on the carpet.

24
The reason seek and need do not appear in the construction in (55) is because they do not

designate instances of the meaning ‘X go-after Y Path.’

25
It is possible to further motivate the constructions in (55) and (56) by demonstrating a chain of

semantic relatedness such that they can be seen to be minimal variants of constructions already

posited to exist. Notice that the verb chase has a similar meaning to that in (55). Its roles can be

captured by the following:

(i) chase (agt/theme sought-after/theme path)

Chase is causal in that the agent argument causes the sought-after argument to move. This

makes chase itself an unremarkable instance of the transitive path resultative represented in (15c).

Its close similarity to the meaning represented in (55) serves to relate the follow cases to the

caused-motion construction. In fact the examples below suggest a chain of semantic relatedness

that serve to relate the transitive path resultative we saw earlier to the representations in (55) and

(56):

(ii) a. She chased the criminals into the building. (cause-go: transitive path resultative

of 15c)
73
 b. She followed the criminals into the building. (minimally different from a, but noncausal:

instance of 55)

c. She followed the trail of clues into the building. (minimally different from b, also

instance of 55)

d. She followed the trail into the building. (minimally different from c, instance of 56)

26
The two of us differ on their preference for these two analyses, with AG preferring the

constructions in (55) and (56) and RJ preferring the construction in (52). The difference stems

from whether one wishes to allow verbs to license syntactic arguments directly (RJ) or whether

one views all argument linking as being done by constructions (AG). Related to this is the issue

of whether one views verbs that are isomorphic with the constructional meaning (e.g., make as it

appears in the resultative or give as it appears in the ditransitive) to be licensed by the

construction (AG) or whether one wishes to allow those verbs to link their arguments to syntax

directly (RJ).
27
Visser and RH&L attribute the failure of passive to the fact that these expressions have subject

hosts. However, the follow cases discussed above also have subject hosts and they readily

passivize:

a. The leak was tracked to its source.

b. The clues were traced to the haunted house.

28
Rappaport Hovav and Levin 2001 have one further example, John swam laps to exhaustion,

which is a property resultative. Again it is far worse if the object is more elaborate: *John swam

laps of the pool to exhaustion. Moreover, we suspect that the judgment here is clouded by an

analogy to John swam laps to the point of exhaustion, where the PP is an adjunct: Sue swam laps
74
until she fainted and John did so to the point of exhaustion. Similar considerations may be

operative in (60a,b), where substitution of the adjunct all the way across the park improves

matters. Moreover, Jackendoff 1990 found examples like (60), but with goal PPs, very dubious:

*?Dave danced waltzes into the room. On the whole, then, everything points to the marginality of

this resultative type.

29
As they put it, ‘the happening in the world described by ..[the] resultative is not linguistically

construed as two distinct events’ (2001:782).

30
Jackendoff 1997b, 2002 argues that these are constructional idioms of English on a par with the

way-construction– not really resultatives. Goldberg would prefer to treat them as

conventionalized instances of the resultative construction related via a default inheritance

hierarchy structure.
31
Goldberg (1995: 195-196) argues that this generalization holds even for RPs such as sick or

hoarse. Although these are normally gradable, when used as RPs, they strongly tend to imply that

a clearly delimited boundary beyond which the activity cannot continue. I.e., He ate himself sick

implies that he ate to a point beyond which he could no longer continue eating.
32
Brian Joseph suggests the pair beat someone senseless and beat someone into submission as

possible counterexamples, but we maintain that the two examples are not synonymous. Notice

that the following are decidedly odd: ?beat someone to senselessness; *beat someone

submissive.

RP # of distinct singleton verbs

Apart 13 verbs Full 4 verbs Silly 9 verbs

Awake 11 verbs Hoarse 4 verbs Stupid 7 verbs

75
Black 5 verbs Into 4 verbs To death 35 verbs

pieces
Clean 5 verbs Into 41 verbs To 11 verbs

shape pieces
Dead 3 verbs Into the 21 verbs To sleep 9 verbs

ground
Dry 9 verbs Open 10 verbs
Flat 16 verbs Shut 13 verbs

Table 1: Productive uses of RPs: tally of distinct verbs that appear only once with listed

RPs in 10 million word corpus (based on raw data reported in Boas 2000, 2003).

76
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Notes

* This paper originated during Jackendoff’s residency at the University of Illinois as the George

A. Miller Visiting Professor in the winter of 2002, when he and Goldberg had extended

opportunities to discuss issues of mutual interest. In particular, we found it important to establish

some of the basic points of convergence between our two somewhat disparate approaches to

grammar – Goldberg coming by way of Construction Grammar/Cognitive Grammar with a

sprinkling of LFG and HPSG, Jackendoff coming by way of a long path diverging gradually from

the Chomskyan tradition. The resultative seemed like an interesting quarry. Jackendoff is grateful

for the support of the Miller Professorship, to Marc Hauser, who made an office at Harvard

available during Jackendoff’s sabbatical in 2002-3, and to Grant DC 03660 from the National

Institutes of Health. We are grateful to two anonymous reviewers, James McCloskey, Brian

Joseph, and Malka Rappaport Hovav for comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.

84
*

1
Construction Grammar defines constructions to be any stored pairings of form and function; according

to this definition, words and morphemes are technically constructions as well. In addition, stored

(typically highly frequent) regularities between form and meaning are considered constructions even if

they are fully compositional. We speak here specifically of partially idiosyncratic phrasal constructions,

using the term in a fairly traditional way.

2
Certain generative proposals such as Marantz (1997) and Borer (1994) likewise suggest that argument

structure is not determined exclusively by the main verb. These accounts, however, differ in critical

respects from the present proposal: 1) the syntax proposed is an underlying level of syntax and is

claimed to be general across all constructions and all languages 2) the meaning involved is also proposed

to be general across all constructions and all languages and 3) the verbs are claimed to contribute only

their encyclopedic semantics without specifying anything at all about their argument structure

possibilities. For a critique of this approach, see Goldberg (fortto appear-c, chapter 3).
3
Families of constructions are relevantly like morphological ‘constellations’ (Janda and Joseph, 1999;

Joseph and Janda, 1985); see also Valimaa-Blum (1988) for an extension of the notion of a constellation

to the syntactic domain.

4
We set aside here passive and middle resultatives, such as The metal was hammered flat and This metal

hammers flat easily. We take it that these expressions are formed by composing the passive and middle

constructions with resultative constructions.