On the argument structure realization of result verbs: A syntactic approach

Abstract

Manner/Result Complementarity (Rappaport Hovav & Levin 2010) has been argued to have consequences for argument realization: only manner verbs permit object deletion and non-selected objects. In contrast, result verbs always co-appear with their object, because they are required to express the undergoer of the change that they entail. We discuss new data involving result verbs in constructions where the undergoer of the change encoded by the result verb is not realized as the object of the predicate. We argue these data display result verbs whose root is integrated into the argument structure of the predicate in such a way that it is interpreted as specifying a co-event of the main event denoted by the predicate, whereby the result entailed by the root is not necessarily intended to hold of the direct object. This follows if verb roots do not come with a syntactically relevant specification for manner or result from the lexicon, but acquire it on the basis of their association with the syntactic structure.