LINGUIST List 4.810

Sun 10 Oct 1993

Sum: Resultative constructions

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1. Nancy Goss, SUMMARY: resultative constructions

I thank everyone who responded to my question:
Bill Croft, Ingo Plag, Susan Fischer, Georgia Green, Oysten Alex.
Vangsnes, Michael Kac, Picus Ding, Anja Leuscheul, Marion Klamer,
Edit Doron, Janet Randell, Leslie Barrett, Rob French, Conner Ferris
The following is a list of references
supplied by these people in response to this question. I will be
happy to send the comments to anybody who is interested.
QUESTION:
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I am beginning to conduct research for my dissertation and would like to
know if any languages besides English, Chinese, Dutch and Italian have the
following or similar types of resultative structures.
English: He hammered the metal flat (small clause result)
 He swept the room clean
Chinese: Ta qide ma hen lei (small clause result)
 he rode horse very tired
 "He rode the horse until he/the horse was tired"
 Ta qilei-le ma (compound verb structure)
 He rode-tired horse
 "He rode the horse until he/horse was tired"
I use small clause result as a description rather than as a representation
of my opinion on actual syntactic structure.
I assume that all languages can express results. I am primarily interested
in examining the constructional variation that languages exhibit in expressing
resultatives. I am also interested in restrictions on verb types that can
occur as the matrix verb in these constructions.
Other information I am interested in is whether these result constructions
look similar to causative constructions in a particular language or whether
they are systematically differentiated. Also, what are the coreference
possibilities between the arguments of the matrix verb and what the result
refers to.
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References:
 1. Vladimir Nedjalkov (ed.) Typology of resultative constructions.
 Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
 2. Mark Baker on serial verbs. NELS from a few years ago.
 3. Georgia Green, Volume from the first Romance linguistics
 conference, edited by Mario Saltarelli and Dieter Wanner.
 4. Georgia Green, article in festschrift for Henry and Renee Kahane,
 edited by Kachru, Saporta and Pietrangeli on English and French.
 5. Ingebjorg Tonne "Scales and participants", MA thesis printed in
 Working Papers in Linguistics from the U of Trondheim. Discusses
 the constructions in Norwegian.
 6. J. Michael Bouldin (1990) "The Syntax and Semantics of Post-
 nominal Adjectives in English", Dissertation, U of Minnesota.
 7. Picus Ding "BA resultative construction in Mandarin" MA thesis,
 Simon Fraser University. Preprint available via ftp from umich.
 archive.
 8. Marion Klamer (forthcoming) "Kambera Morphology" Dissertation
 9. Adele Goldberg on resultatives, BLS 2-3 years ago.
 10. Jill Carrier and Janet Randall in LI (1992) The Argument Structure
 and Syntactic Structure of Resultatives
 11. Randall (1983) "A lexical approach to causatives" Journal of
 Linguistic Research 2, 77-105.
 12. Simpson (1983) "resultatives" in Levin, Rappaport and Zaenen,
 Papers in Lexical-Functional Grammar
 13. Carrier & Randall (1993) Lexical Mapping in Reuland & Abraham (eds)
 Knowledge & Language vol,2 Kluwer
 14. Jackendoff (1990) Semantic Structures, MIT Press.
 15. Levin & Rappaport on unaccusatives also discusses resultatives
 16. Mark Sebba, The Syntax of Serial Verbs
 17. Rothstein, Dissertation on Icelandic
 18. T. Rappaport in WCCFL 5 on Hebrew
 19. Carol Lord (1993) Historical Change in Serial Verb Constructions
 20. Francis Byrne and Thom Huebner (1992), Structure and development
 of creole languages, in the Bickerton Festschrift.
 21. Lefebvre, Claire, a recent collection of paperss.
 22. Connor Ferris (just out) The Meaning of Syntax
Nancy Goss
gosschopin.udel.edu