The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics

Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 23
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Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 23, No. 0, pp. 516-534
Abbreviation: KASELL
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Received 18 Apr 2023 Revised 12 Jun 2023 Accepted 16 Jun 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.23..202307.516

Three Types of the Intransitive Resultative Construction in English: A Generative Account
Mun-Hong Choe
Professor, Dept. of English Education, Chonnam National University Tel: 062) 530-2435 (munhong@jnu.ac.kr)


© 2023 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract

Through a close examination of the grammatical constraints of English resultatives discussed in the previous literature, this study argues that morpheme-based generative accounts have more explanatory adequacy than constructional-semantic accounts. The constructional view classifies English resultatives into four syntactic varieties: transitive resultatives with a selected/unselected object and intransitive resultatives with/without an object, and considers them to comprise a family resemblance of which the core type is the caused motion-path construction (Goldberg and Jackendoff 2004). Focusing on intransitive resultatives which have been more controversial, we review a range of attested data from previous research sources and make the case that despite their resemblance, they are not identical in semantics. Specifically, we propose that there are at least three distinct types of morphosyntactic derivation: transitivized (agentive), causativized (happenstantial), copularized (extentional) resultatives, and that those with an overt object are instances of argument structure augmentation derived from the verb’s intransitive-to-transitive/causative alterations and those without an object are instances of argument structure augmentation derived from the verb’s unaccusative-to-copular extension. The discussion has led to the conclusion that the semantico-syntactic nature of intransitive resultatives can be explained more adequately by morpheme conflations than by a virtually infinite number of constructional idiosyncrasies on the basis of semantic uniformity.

Keywords: resultative, syntax-semantics interface, secondary predicate, argument structure, constructional grammar
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