A Causation-based Approach to Resultatives

Abstract

Resultatives have been defined mainly either by a syntactic restriction such as the Direct Object Restriction (DOR) or a semantic feature such as telicity. Based on the causation-based approach, I show that the construction of resultatives accommodates the result phrase (XP) with a causative interpretation in two distinctive ways, and suggest that the concept of (in)direct causation plays a key role in the linguistic coding and individuation of causal events. It gives a natural account for the reason that the unsaturated result phrase subcategorized by the transitive verb should be analyzed as bare while the saturated result phrase not subcategorized by the unergative verb should be analyzed as clausal with a logical subject position filled up.