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CHAPTER FOUR

LEXICAL-CONSTRUCTIONAL SUBSUMPTION IN RESULTATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS IN ENGLISH1

FRANCISCO JOSÉ RUIZ DE MENDOZA IBÁÑEZ & ALBA LUZONDO OYÓN

1. Introduction

This paper is concerned with a descriptively and explanatorily ad-equate account of otherwise puzzling acceptability differences of the type exemplified in (1) below:

(1) a. He drove/*guided me crazy.b. He hammered/*hit/*stroke the metal flat.c. He carved/*cut the wood into a toy.d. He cut the wood into boards.e. He ran/#strolled his Nikes threadbare.

These examples are instances of what is commonly referred to in the literature as the resultative construction, i.e. a type of transitivity pattern that specifies the outcome of a change of state, property or location under-gone by a person or an entity. Resultatives have been the object of a large number of studies from different perspectives: formal (e.g. Hoekstra 1988; Levin 1993), functional (e.g. Halliday 1967), cognitive and/or construc-tionist (e.g. Boas 2002, 2003, 2005, 2008ab; Broccias 2003, 2004; Gold-berg and Jackendoff 2004; Iwata 2006). Since the amount of research is

1 Financial support for this research has been provided by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, grant number HUM2007-65755. For further updated in-formation on the developments of the LCM, we refer the reader to the webpage <www.lexicom.es>.

Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibañez & Alba Luzondo Oyón

immense, we will focus our attention on what we believe—for reasons that will become apparent in our analysis below—is the most promising ap-proach to resultatives, i.e. one where the syntactic configuration is motiv-ated by the principled interaction between lexical and constructional struc-ture. This is the perspective generally adopted by constructionist studies within Cognitive Linguistics, including the Lexical-Constructional Model (LCM henceforth), as developed by Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal (2008, 2011), and Mairal and Ruiz de Mendoza (2008, 2009) (cf. Butler 2009, for a critical overview). Closely connected with the resultative constructions exemplified in (1) above are constructs or patterns such as the ones in (2):

(2) a. Pat kicked the ball across the field.b. I want you out of my house.c. The audience laughed the actor off the stage.d. She loved me back into existence.

Following Goldberg (1995, 2006) these are instances of the caused-motion construction, which is often schematized as ‘X CAUSES Y TO MOVE Z’: (2a) is a standard non-figurative use where caused motion is the result of physical impact; (2b) is an example of manipulative construction (Gonzálvez-García 2008), where caused motion is the result of the speaker’s ability to direct someone else’s behaviour; (2c) is a case where expected motion is the future result of psychological or emotional impact; finally, (2d) makes figurative use of the caused-motion configuration in order to express a change in an emotional state. For current purposes, the canonical meaning of this construction involves the (actual or prospective) change of location of an entity by an instigator of motion in such a way that the entity in question moves along a designated path. This canonical meaning covers cases like (2a), (2b) and (2c), while (2d) can be con-sidered an extended use. The caused-motion construction has been dis-cussed in the literature in relation to resultative constructions and con-struction grammarians like Goldberg (1995) have argued that the caused-motion construction is a metaphorical extension of resultatives on the basis of the observation that a change of state can be seen as a change of location (cf. Lakoff 1987, 1993; Lakoff and Johnson, 1999). Since, ac-cording to Goldberg, resultatives express resultant states and states can be seen as locations, then a caused change of state can be seen as caused change of location, which is captured by the caused-motion construction. We will come back to this issue in the face of our data at a later stage in this paper.

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Lexical-Constructional Subsumption in Resultative Constructions

The notion of construction is another issue that has generated a vast amount of literature. The reader may be referred to Schönefeld (2006) for an overview of different treatments and developments of this notion. Fol-lowing Goldberg (1995) constructions have often been described as “form-meaning pairings” where the whole exceeds the sum of the parts. How-ever, quite recently, the notion of construction has been broadened to en-compass any (highly) frequent non-compositional form-function pairing (Goldberg 2006). This downgrading of the idiosyncrasy requirement in the definition of a construction—which, as it stands now, comes fairly close to Langacker’s (1987) notion of “symbolic assemblies”—has met with criti-cism on the basis that the resulting definition is too unconstrained (cf. Bod 2009, Östman and Fried 2004, among others). The LCM regards construc-tions as form-meaning pairings where form realizes semantic (or concep-tual) structure and, in so doing, cues for the activation of conceptual struc-ture. Furthermore, conceptual structure can vary in nature: lexical structure is captured by lexical templates (cf. Mairal and Faber 2007), which in the case of verbal predicates, consists of amalgams of lexical functions and primes that have a number of external variables (for syntactic projection) within their scope; then, the LCM recognizes a number of constructional types, among them argument structure constructions, such as the caused-motion construction, which are the result of abstracting away elements that are common to lower-level verbal configurations (e.g. caused-motion verbal predicates such as kick, push, thrust, etc.). The LCM then specifies the conditions for the combination of lexical structure and argument con-structions and also for the incorporation of this output into higher-level constructions of a pragmatic and discourse kind, a process that we will summarize in section 3 below. Treating argument constructions as having their own ontological status is useful in order to account for some uses of lexical predicates, which would otherwise require postulating unreason-able amounts of lexical polysemy as is evident from (2b), (2c), and (2d) above. Therefore, we concur with Goldberg (1995, 2006) that it is not reasonable to argue that want, laugh, and love have an intrinsic caused-motion sense. But if we acknowledge the independent status of the caused-motion construction, then it is only necessary to specify under what cir-cumstances it is possible to incorporate into the construction predicates like the ones mentioned above but not others (cf. *I write you out of my house, *The audience described the actor off the stage, *She approached me out of existence). In Goldberg’s initial proposal, the construction adds (new) meaning (e.g. in Pat sneezed the napkin off the table we see the sneezing event as part of a general causal chain that can be paraphrased as ‘Pat’s sneezing caused the napkin to fall off the table’). The construction is

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not only capable of contributing arguments (observe that sneeze is actually an intransitive verb, and therefore the Y and Z arguments are supplied by the caused-motion construction in this example), but also of creating se-mantic constraints on the predicates that may fuse (Goldberg 1995: 50) with each particular construction. These findings, some of which have been supported experimentally (cf. Eddington and Ruiz de Mendoza 2010, for a review), are important to the extent that they allow the linguist to simplify the descriptive apparatus of a theory while preserving and even enhancing its explanatory power. However, there is, in our view, a more fundamental issue that still awaits a fully satisfactory response on both de-scriptive and explanatory grounds: there should be a fine-grained account of how lexical-constructional fusion works and what it is that licenses or puts limits to the incorporation of a lexical item into a given construction, as noted above. Usually, the notion of coercion (Goldberg 1995, 2006; Mi-chaelis 2003) is invoked in this connection. The argument here is that lex-ical-constructional fusion is generally possible if there is conceptual com-patibility between lexical and constructional configurations; but when there is no such compatibility, fusion may still take place if it is possible for constructional meaning to coerce lexical meaning. This is, however, a very limited explanation since it does not provide a sufficiently fine-grained specification of when coercion is possible and when it is not. In our view, the LCM has developed enough analytical tools to provide an initial solution to the problem in the form of constraints on lexical-con-structional fusion (a process which in the model is referred to as subsump-tion, thus capturing the fact that lexical structure may be altered to be ad-apted to constructional structure but not the other way around).

The present paper aims to examine in detail lexical-constructional fu-sion processes for the resultative construction, which Goldberg (1995) characterizes as ‘X CAUSES Y TO BECOME Z’, in which the Z element is an adjectival predicate (e.g. He hammered the metal flat). In our work, the caused-motion construction and the resultative are considered members of the larger family of resultative constructions (Goldberg and Jackendoff 2004). A similar view is held by Boas (2003) and Broccias (2003, 2004), who, on the basis of the STATES ARE LOCATIONS metaphor, do not posit a distinction between these patterns since ultimately both denote a change in the postverbal element (whether it designates a state or a location). We also contend that there are two basic interpretation schemas underlying the resultative construction. One, which we schematize as A > A’, is what we will refer to as the “prototypical resultative construction”; this configura-tion, which realizes the Z element through an adjectival predicate (e.g. He painted the house red), occurs in cases in which there is a resulting state

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where the patient is observed as solely gaining a new property. A second schema, which we represent as A > B, obtains when, as a consequence of the action denoted by the verb, the patient is observed as changing into a new state of being. Interestingly, this schema is a resultative construction that makes use of the caused-motion configuration (e.g. He smashed his guitar to pieces). We thus examine some examples that fall into one or the other category and discuss their basic properties in terms of various amal-gams of cognitive models as well as the principles that license their com-bination.

2. The Goldbergian approach to resultatives

When analyzing the connections that hold between verbs and construc-tions, Goldberg (1995, 2006) associates lexical items with rich frame se-mantic meanings. Hence, once constructions are decomposed into abstract predicate-argument structures such as CAUSE-BECOME <agt pat result-goal> for the resultative, the verb’s profiled participant roles fuse with the construction argument roles in a principled manner. According to her, it is the construction that specifies which verbs may be incorporated into the construction and which may not, applying both general and construction-specific constraints to predicate fusion. However, in such a fully construc-tionist theory little consideration is given to the role that lexical items play in this process. While Goldberg does not deny that verbal semantics does play a role, it is nonetheless true that the descriptive and explanatory bur-den revolves around constructional semantics rather than lexical semantics in her strand of Construction Grammar. In this connection, Boas (2003, 2008b) has criticized Goldberg’s account along the following lines: if the lexical entries of semantically related verbs such as talk, speak, whisper, grumble, murmur and sigh display the same structure, what is it that pre-vents the fusion of most of these predicates with the resultative construc-tion?

(3) a. Miriam talked herself blue in the face.b.*Miriam spoke/grumbled/murmured herself blue in the face.c. ?Miriam whispered/sighed herself blue in the face.

These examples alone suffice to show that Goldberg’s account is not sufficiently refined to explain the distribution of predicates within the res-ultative construction, and thus both the role of constructions as well as that of predicates should be observed and explained when dealing with the

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complex issue of lexical-constructional subsumption. But to Boas’s ex-amples, we can add others that express resultative meaning through the figurative use of the caused-motion construction:

(4) a. The blacksmith hammered the piece of iron into the shape of a dove.

b. Bush stunned me into silence.c. He almost scared me out of my wits.

Examples of the type in (4) above, regardless of their varying degrees of productivity, cannot be merely discarded or assigned to the ‘periphery’. It is our position that these qualify as constructions and are to be accoun-ted for too. We need to know (i) why they make use of a caused-motion configuration instead of an adjectival predicate, and (ii) why predicates like scare in (4c), which inherently expresses result (the predicate can be decomposed into ‘cause to become frightened’), can non-redundantly be fused into a construction that makes explicit the resultative element.

3. The Lexical-Constructional Model: a brief overview

Before presenting our analysis on lexical-constructional fusion under the scope of the resultative pattern, we shall provide the reader with a brief outline of the LCM. This model emerges as an effort to reconcile a num-ber of opposed theoretical assumptions held by projectionist theories, on the one hand, and cognitively-oriented approaches to language, on the other. To that end, the LCM combines insights from Role and Reference Grammar (Van Valin 2005), Construction Grammar (Goldberg 1995, 2006) and Cognitive Semantics (Lakoff, 1987; Lakoff and Johnson 1999). Functional approaches usually work under the assumption that syntactic structures can be predicted on the basis of the information coded by the lexical item in conjunction with a set of linking rules, thus disregarding the indisputable strength that constructions display in predicting morphosyn-tactic structure. However, as has been made obvious in Goldberg (1995, 2006), constructions are capable of adding arguments whose final meaning (i.e. the caused-motion/resultative sense in the example They scorned him into a depression) is not derivable from verbal projection (i.e. the argu-ment structure of scorn). Conversely, construction-based approaches have not fully explained what it is that allows and/or constrains the unification between a given syntactic pattern and a lexical entry. Why is it possible for us to say The bread cuts easily, The window breaks easily (middle con-

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struction), while a sentence such as *The building destroys easily is odd? Thus, the LCM has as its primary concern to develop a usage-based (i.e. focused on real attested data) model of meaning construction that is cap-able of explaining these facets of meaning.

An important methodological assumption sustained by the LCM has to do with the idea that all levels of linguistic description may make use of the same or at least comparable cognitive processes. This assumption has been termed the equipollence hypothesis (Mairal and Ruiz de Mendoza 2009). Metaphor and metonymy have been widely attested at the lexical level, but the two phenomena have been proved to occur at other levels of linguistic explanation, including so-called core grammar. Thus metonymy has been found to underlie such varied phenomena as categorial and sub-categorial conversion processes, as well as some constructional alterna-tions (cf. Ruiz de Mendoza and Pérez 2001; Ruiz de Mendoza and Peña 2008; Peña and Ruiz de Mendoza 2009). For example, the metonymy INSTRUMENT FOR ACTION motivates the categorial conversion of the noun hammer into a verb in He hammered the nail into the wall (Kövecses and Radden 1998). Similarly, the countable noun America is made uncount-able in There is a lot of America in what she does, as motivated by the metonymy AN ENTITY FOR ONE OF ITS PROPERTIES. Or, think of the use of the apparently deviant complementation pattern of verbs like enjoy and be-gin in She enjoyed the beer (i.e. She enjoyed/began drinking/canning, etc., the beer), where the metonymy OBJECT FOR ACTION is at work. The use of static verbs like live with a dynamic preposition—explained by Lakoff (1987) as involving image schema transformations—is also motivated by a metonymy, as in She lives over the hill/across the road/past the post of-fice, all of which hinge of the metonymy ACTION FOR RESULT. Metaphor has so far only been detected in some grammatical alternations. A very clear case of metaphor is when we see one type of action as if it were an-other type of action (Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal 2007). For example, in He talked me into it we treat the verb talk, which designates an activity, as if it were an effectual action (i.e. an action that has a direct physical impact on the object causing it to change location). Since metaphors and met-onymies of this kind are based on generic cognitive models such as ‘ac-tion’, ‘result’, ‘entity’, ‘property’, they are usually labelled “high-level” metaphor and metonymy.

In the LCM high-level metaphor and metonymy are viewed as (ex-ternal) constraining factors on lexical-constructional fusion. Other (con-strained) cognitive processes such as conceptual cueing (i.e. a form of guided inferential activity) and constructional subsumption (i.e. the incor-poration of lower level constructions, such as lexical templates, into higher

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level ones) are also contemplated in the model. For the sake of clarifica-tion, let us deal with one example. Consider again the caused-motion use of the verbal predicate laugh, as in (2c) above or in the following non-arti-ficial example:

(5) The men who laughed him out of the St. Louis Convention when he prophesied Parker’s defeat have wondered ever since if they did not take Murphy too lightly.2

Since laugh is an activity predicate (i.e. one designating a dynamic, non-telic and non-punctual state of affairs; cf. Van Valin 2005: 33), we need to address the issue of why and how this predicate—which typically governs a prepositional complement—can participate in a construction that requires a causative accomplishment predicate (which, unlike activit-ies, is telic and involves a causal chain in its event structure specification; cf. Van Valin 2005: 33). The LCM suggests that laugh in sentences like (2c) and (5) has suffered a subcategorial conversion process from laugh-at’ (x, y) to laugh’ (x, y). It is further postulated, as in Construction Gram-mar, that subcategorial conversion is partially a consequence of the Over-ride Principle (Michaelis 2003), which states that the meaning of a lexical item has to conform to the meaning of the structure in which it is placed. Thus, in order for laugh to be part of the caused-motion construction, some meaning adjustment is necessary whereby laugh ceases to be an activity predicate and is made to function as if it were a causative accom-plishment predicate, capable of designating caused-motion. The difference with the Construction Grammar approach is that the LCM claims that the reason why the meaning adjustment is possible lies in a metaphorical in-terpretation of the verb. In harmony with the definition of metaphor largely accepted within the field of Cognitive Linguistics (i.e. a conceptual mapping between two domains), the LCM proposes the high-level meta-phor AN EXPERIENTIAL ACTION IS AN EFFECTUAL ACTION to account for this phenomenon. Logically, such a metaphor imposes constraints on lex-ical-constructional subsumption by licensing, as in (6) and (7), or block-ing, as in (8), subcategorial conversion of other “experiential action” pre-dicates:

(6) She winked her way through Piccadilly.(7) She waved me into the room. (8) *Sharon shivered me into the kitchen.

2 Example taken from the New York Times web site: http://www.nytimes.com/.

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The constraining power of the metaphor hinges on its ability to see one kind of object as another kind of object. This is possible in the case of ‘wink’ and ‘wave’, which designate goal-oriented activities, but is im-possible in the case of ‘shiver’, which cannot have a complement. The LCM offers other examples of high-level metaphors and metonymies, which explain the conceptual motivation for certain constructional alterna-tions as well as other grammatical phenomena. Among them, we have A COMMUNICATIVE ACTIVITY IS AN EFFECTUAL ACTION (e.g. He talked me into it), AN ACTIVITY IS AN (EFFECTUAL) ACTION (e.g. He drank himself into a stupor), AN EMOTIONAL STATE IS AN EFFECTUAL ACTION (e.g. Peter loved Mary back into life), or the PROCESS FOR ACTION metonymy (e.g. The door closed easily).

Metaphor and metonymy act on lexical-constructional subsumption by specifying conditions that are external to the process. But there are other conditions that make reference to the internal semantic make-up of the lex-ical and constructional templates (Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal 2008). We give a brief outline of internal constraints in the following subsections.

3.1. Full matching

This first internal constraint specifies that the lexical item needs to fit all constructional requirements. This means that there must be full identi-fication of variables, subevents and operators between the lexical template and the constructional template. For example, drink, which is typically a transitive predicate, can occur in the intransitive form (e.g. Leave me alone! I just want to drink), thus being forced to lose its second argument so it can be part of the construction.

3.2. Event identification condition

Owing to the fact that lexical and constructional templates need to fuse in a principled way, the subevents specified by each of these constructs are also required to match. Consider, for instance, the conative construction (e.g. Anna hit at the wall), which includes a motion subevent. The very ex-istence of this motion subevent licenses the incorporation into the con-struction of verbal predicates that exhibit the same quality. Thus, activity predicates such as touch (e.g. *Anna touched at the dog), which does not contain a motion subevent, would be disallowed.

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3.3. Lexical class constraint

Compare the use of the verbs break and destroy in the following sen-tences together with their representation in terms of lexical primes:

(9) a. The vase broke = do’ (x, Ø) CAUSE [BECOME broken’ (y)]b. *The building destroyed = do’ (x, Ø) CAUSE [BECOME des-

troyed’ (y)]

Even through break and destroy have the same logical representations, as evidenced by the descriptions above, only the former can take part in the inchoative construction. The reason for this apparent irregularity is to be found in the different lexical-class ascription of each of the two predicates in question: whereas break is a change-of-state verb, destroy codes cessa-tion of existence, which prevents it from being subsumed into the inchoat-ive pattern. Similarly, other destroy-verbs are blocked out:

(10) *The building demolished (quite rapidly). (11) *The house tore down.(12) *The mighty hurricane devastated.

There is a reason why the inchoative construction behaves in this way. As shown in Ruiz de Mendoza and Peña (2008), the construction is char-acterized by presenting an action as if it were a process. The action is re-coverable by means of a metonymic mapping from the pretended process to the actual action (PROCESS FOR ACTION), which is possible when we the verbal predicate is liable to be envisaged as a process. This is not the case with cessation-of-existence verbs, which focus on the result of a process but not on the process itself.

3.4. Lexical blocking

Lexical blocking covers cases in which one component of the lexical template impedes the fusion with a given construction, when such a com-ponent is a suppletive form (i.e. a word A is replaced by a different word B to express a particular grammatical form of word A, as is the case with went, which replaces go in the past tense). Take the inchoative construc-tion once again. If we attempt to make kill participate in such a configura-tion, this internal constraint will block this process out since kill already

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possesses a suppletive form (i.e. die) stored in the lexicon to express its objectless counterpart:

(13) Mac killed the bird.(14) The bird died.(15) *The bird killed.

3.5. Predicate-argument conditioning

Sometimes a lexical template can place restrictions on the kind of in-stantiating element that we can have for a constructional argument. Con-sider the constructional structure of the caused-motion construction, which takes the form of X-pred-Y(=NP)-Z(=PP). In theory, the constructional template can take any verb participant role to instantiate the Y element, which can be either human or non-human (e.g. Jaime pushed Erin into the car; The sun slashed its way into the room). However, once the predicate and PP slots have been filled in, this choice constrains the kind of Y ele-ment that we can have. For example, in Anna loved me back into life, the Y element has been realized by a human verb role. Hence, it would be in-felicitous to say that *Anna loved a chair back into life.

3.6. Internal variable conditioning

In the LCM lexical structure contains external variables (or predicate arguments) and internal variables (or amalgams of semantic primes that capture syntactically relevant semantic and pragmatic information), where the latter are bound to (and thus syntactically projected through) the former. Internal variables may determine the nature of both the predicate and constructional arguments. For example, in resultative phrases, the ‘drive-crazy’ sense of the verb drive tends to denote a negative mental state, which is why it collocates with mad, to madness, to distraction, in-sane, wild, etc. This sense of drive usually disallows the occurrence of a Z element describing a positive state: kind, happy, joyful, pleasant, etc.

Having provided a general overview of the architecture and the analyt-ical tools of the LCM at argument structure level, in what follows we shall illustrate how the LCM can furnish a fine-grained analysis of resultatives on both descriptive and explanatory grounds.

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4. The LCM approach to resultatives

In our view, the account of internal and external constraints on lexical-constructional subsumption provided by the LCM contains a number of explanatory tools that prove useful to account for the intricacies of res-ultative expressions in English. Consider the examples in (16):

(16) a. He hammered the metal into a ring/into a contorted mass of loops (A>B).

b. He broke the vase to pieces/into a thousand little pieces (A>B).

c. He hammered the metal flat/straight (A>A’).d. He smashed the meatball flat with a spatula (A>A’).e. *He hammered the metal tubular/square/long (*A>A’).f. *The building was destroyed to pieces (*A>B).

As mentioned above, there are two basic interpretation schemas under-

lying resultatives: (a) if after the action denoted by the verb, an entity A is construed as experiencing a conspicuous change in one of its properties, B, or if A loses its homogeneity, then a prepositional phrase is required, as is the case in (16a) and (16b); (b) as shown in (16c) and (16d), if after the ac-tion denoted by the predicate, an entity A acquires a new quality but ulti -mately retains its “essence”, an adjectival predicate is used. This explains why adjectives such as square, tubular or long cannot specify the result of the acts of ‘hammering’ or ‘smashing’, since each of these adjectives in-volves a change in one of the properties that the object has (i.e. a given shape) but not the acquisition of a completely new property, as is required by the A>B pattern. However, it is possible to express the idea of property change by means of the figurative use of the caused-motion construction: He hammered the metal into a square/tubular shape, into a long piece, etc. In turn, predicates such as break, splinter, fracture, crack, and decompose make use of the caused-motion construction to indicate a transcendent change (the A>B pattern), which is but the simultaneous change of a whole set of properties which are taken as central (rather than accidental) for the entity to be such.

This account contrasts with the explanation provided by Broccias (2003) for the impossibility of (16e). Broccias argues that adjectival res-ultative constructions abide by what he calls the part-whole affectedness generalization: “if an adjective in a resultative construction describes a property P of an affected object Y, then P describes any part of Y (if pos-sible)” (Broccias 2003: 157). According to him, this means that resultative

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constructions code affectedness but they also require (if possible) complete affectedness. Thus, we can say John hammered the metal flat, but not *John hammered the metal long/tubular/square. Since long, tubular or square describe properties of the whole entity they are ruled out by the construction, while flat, which describes a property of any part of the en-tity (i.e. is a part-whole adjective), is accepted within the construction. In our view, however, Broccias’s argument has an important flaw (see Boas 2003, and Iwata 2006, for more detailed criticism): we can ask ourselves in what way it is possible to argue that flat, but not long, tubular or square, does not apply to the whole entity. In John hammered the metal flat, all of the metal, not just part of it, is made flat. Furthermore, Broc-cias’s generalization does not explain why a prepositional phrase is used in examples like He hammered the metal into a ring. One more problem is that, according to the generalization, if resultative constructions cannot ap-ply whenever there is complete affectedness and thus adjectival predicates need to specify only a partial effect on the object, then it should be feasible to conceive the following situations as possible, which is obviously not the case:

(17) a. ?We have drunk the barrel dry, but parts of it are wet.b. ?The low temperature froze the river solid, but part of the river

did not freeze. c. ?The blacksmith hammered the metal flat, but he left part of it

rugged. d. ?John pushed the door open, but part of it did not open.

Following Broccias’s argumentation, we could refine his explanation by admitting that certain adjectives (e.g. long) can only refer to the totality of something (i.e. an object cannot be long while a part of it is short/less long). This means that we cannot change one part of the length of an entity without changing all of it/the whole. As opposed to that, adjectives such as dry can both refer to the whole of the object (e.g. somebody drinks a barrel dry) and to parts of it at the same time (e.g. a towel can mainly be dry al-though parts of it can still be wet). Whatever the case may be, Broccias’s explanation is incomplete for the reasons evidenced in our own account of the examples in (16) above.

Similarly, Broccias argues that a sentence such as *He painted the room beautiful is infelicitous since beautiful is intended to describe the room as a whole and thus arbitrarily chosen parts of it may not be neces-sarily beautiful. However, we believe that the reason why this adjective cannot be employed lies in the fact that beautiful is not a natural result of

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human controlled activity, but an inherent (although subjectively ascribed) property of some entities. One can beautify an environment by, for ex-ample, planting flowers and trees in a deserted place. However, we cannot say *The gardener planted the garden beautiful with roses but rather The gardener made the garden beautiful with roses/by planting roses where the causal link is made fully explicit by means of the causative predicate make. Thus, beautiful is not perceived as the result of the gardener’s activ-ity (i.e. it is not a resultative predicate) but as a property of ‘garden’ after the gardener has planted roses.

Resultatives involve a change of state either in the broad sense of this term or in a more restricted sense of a property change or of the acquisi-tion of a new property. If there is a change of the state in the broad sense, as in (18a) below, where the vase changes from a state of wholeness to one of fragmentation, resultative constructions are sensitive to the causative/in-choative alternation in terms of the lexical class constraint. But this is not the case when the resultative expression is merely based on the change of a property or on the adscription of a new property to the object, as in (18b-d):

(18) a. The child broke the vase into a thousand pieces /The vase broke into a thousand pieces.

b. He hammered the metal flat/ *The metal hammered flat.c. He hammered the metal into a ring/*The metal hammered

into a ring.d. He drove me crazy/*I drove crazy.

Note that hammer, unlike break, is not a change-of-state predicate. The metal that is hammered until it acquires a certain shape is still metal. But in The vase broke into pieces, the vase is no longer such. Compare The ex-cess of heat melted the ice/ The ice melted, where there is also a clear change of state. Or compare The magician turned the dove into a frog/ The dove turned into a frog. There is a change of state too, which correlates with the possibility to use the verb in its inchoative form. A peculiar case is He broke the box open/The box broke open, which is an alternative con-strual of the state of affairs denoted by The box opened, where the verb break is not used to denote a complete change of state (the box was not fully broken) but a partial one that results in its object (the box) acquiring a new property (i.e. being open). As with the metal in (18b) above, the box retains its essence as a box, but acquires a new property, i.e. that of being open. The explanation of the examples in (16) is a question of internal constraints, i.e. different kinds of conceptual compatibility. But the possib-

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ility of using some resultative configurations as part of inchoative con-structions, as shown in (18a), and all cases of change-of-state verbal pre-dicates, is also a matter of external constraints, in this case of the high-level metonymy PROCESS FOR ACTION. This metonymy allows us to see controlled actions (i.e. following Dik 1997, dynamic states of affairs where there is an agent that determines the nature of the state of affairs) as if they were processes, which are dynamic but uncontrolled. The met-onymic expression denotes a process that stands for –and affords access to– the action underlying it. Let us now discuss the following example:

(19) Lakers snapped back to reality/ I snapped back into conscious-ness (A>A’).

This sentence encodes an A > A’ schema (typical of canonical resultat-ive constructions), since the basketball team does not really suffer a change of state, which involves a figurative caused-motion treatment of the predicate in hand, as was the case for (18c) above. In fact, the motiva-tion for this use could be stated at the semantic level (snap ‘break with a sharp cracking sound’), if we understand that it is the noisy sound entailed by the predicate that causes the patient to wake up and come back to real-ity. The crucial issue here is that the verb snap usually collocates with ‘fingers’, which means that there has been a violation of its canonical sense. Thus, we could re-read the previous sentence as: someone snapped his/her fingers at the Lakers and, as a consequence, the Lakers became aware of reality. Such an experientially-grounded conflation of events—linked through a cause-consequence relationship—is perceived in the speaker’s mind as a single whole. Hence, for a construction to capture this fusion of events, three compulsory elements need to be present: (i) an ef-fector; (ii) an affected object, and (iii) a reaction of the affected object ex-pressed as a resultant state. Both the resultative and the caused-motion configurations contain these elements; however, the latter is preferred, even though an A > A’ schema is present, for the reasons stated above. In turn, the caused-motion construction requires a verbal predicate that ex-presses an effectual action. Since snap does not meet such a prerequisite, for it to be subsumed into this pattern, we need to activate the high-level metaphor AN ACTIVITY IS AN EFFECTUAL ACTION. In this line of thinking, we understand the goal of the “snapping” action (the Lakers) as the direct receiver of its effects (i.e. the goal is treated as an effectee). Now, once we have performed a subcategorial conversion of the predicate, it is possible to apply the high-level metonymy PROCESS FOR ACTION whereby the direct object becomes a subject, while the true agent becomes latent. In relation

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to the internal constraints signalled by the LCM, more specifically the lex-ical class constraint, we may refer the reader back to example (9b) above. Even though destroy is a hyponym of break verbs, it is the lexical inform-ation encoded in this predicate that ultimately blocks its incorporation into the resultative construction. Such a verb expresses the idea that somebody carries out an action such that an entity does not longer exist (cf. Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal 2008). From this it follows that destroy, unlike break, is not a change of state verb but rather a cessation of existence pre-dicate which logically does not permit any outcome event to be overtly realized (cf. The bomb destroyed the house/*The bomb destroyed the house into pieces/fragments/dust). Now observe the following examples:

(20) a. He drank himself unconscious/silly.b. She drank herself into madness/ into a stupor/into a depres-

sion.

The verb in (20a) is subsumed into the canonical resultative construc-tion, thus calling for an A > A’ structure in which the patient acquires a new property (i.e. they drank to the point where they became unconscious or silly). Since the drinker cannot be the object of drinking (cf. He drank a bottle of wine, *He drank himself) we have another high-level metaphoric process at work, AN ACTIVITY IS AN EFFECTUAL ACCOMPLISHMENT (cf. Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal 2007), in which both doing something in connection to an object and doing something to an object have an actor and a goal of the action in common. This metaphor is, in turn, chained to a high-level metonymy whereby the property of being ‘unconscious’ or ‘silly’ stands for the consequences of the action on the object. Example (20b) expresses another effect of heavy drinking different from the stand-ard effect described in (20a) (i.e. ‘getting drunk’ plus its associated con-sequences of losing consciousness or acting in a silly way). In all these cases, the patient still undergoes an A > A’ process achieved through a fig-urative use of the caused-motion configuration. Further note that for sen-tences such as He drank himself into a comma /into a frenzy /into a stupor no adjectival predicate exists in the English language (e.g.*stupored) and thus a prepositional phrase is selected. Some other times, however, the res-ultative adjective and a caused-motion PP can co-exist although English prefers the latter:

(21) a. He drank himself into madness.b. ?He drank himself mad.c. He drank himself into a depression.

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d. ?He drank himself depressed.

Even though they are possible, corpus data only shows a few occur-rences for cases like (21b) and (21d), thus indicating that, since we under-stand the patient as metaphorically moving into another state, the caused-motion construction is preferred over the resultative one. Furthermore, it is important to note that most of these sentences specify an axiologically negative Z element (‘depression’, ‘madness’, ‘unconsciousness’, etc.), which in the LCM is taken to be a matter of internal-variable condition-ing, as explained in section 3.6.

5. Conclusion

We have presented two basic generalization schemas underlying the construction(s) under analysis, which have proved useful to account for the variable distribution of resultative constructions. We have argued for the explanatory adequacy of this account, which we have enriched with a careful examination of the factors that license or block lexical-construc-tional fusion. In this connection, we have shown that the LCM stands as a powerful, elegant model that can shed light on the complex process of lex-ical-constructional subsumption in argument structure characterizations. Finally, in line with Boas (2003, 2008b), we have identified some of the flaws that Goldberg’s (1995) constructionist approach presents when it comes to examining the fusion of lexical items within a particular con-struction. We have sorted out the flaws through the specification of sets of internal and external constraints on the fusion process.

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€¦ · Web viewLexical blocking covers cases in which one component of the lexical template impedes the fusion with a given construction, when such a component is a suppletive