This project is looking for the Resultative Construction (= RC), e.g. John hammered the metal flat, in 2 Romance (i.e. French, Spanish) and 2 Germanic Languages (i.e. English and Dutch). RCs are a priori atypical of Romance languages, which belong to the so-called class of ‘verb-framed’ languages (cf. Talmy 1985, 1991) and are therefore not expected to encode the result of an event outside the matrix verb.
While RCs have been described by many scholars as impossible in Romance (cf. Levin & Rapoport 1988, Aske 1989, Tenny 1994, Snyder 2001, 2012, Mateu 2000, Mateu & Rigau 2010, Mateu 2012, Acedo-Matellan 2012), others have come to recognize the existence of – albeit less productive – RCs in these languages (cf. for Italian: Napoli 1992, Folli & Ramchand 2005; for French: Legendre 1997, Riegel 1996, Muller 2000; for Spanish: Martinez Vazquez 1998, Arrizabalaga 2016; for Romanian: Farkas 2009, 2011). In fact, Romance RCs are said to only exhibit 'weak' RCs (cf. Washio 1997) in which the RSP only specifies or emphasizes a result already encoded in the verb, and/or to be limited to certain verb classes (cf. Arrizabalga, 2012). However, none of these alleged limitations has been subjected to a systematic corpus based research, and even less so from a comparative point of view.
The aim of the project is then to provide a fined-grained corpus based description of these constructions (i.e. which verbs are accepted in these constructions? Through which morphosyntactic categories is the resultative secondary predicate instantiated?). Several verb classes will be investigated, including nomination verbs, chromatic change verbs, cooking verbs. The results of our empirical analysis aim to answer more theoretically-oriented questions: to what extent Romance RCs resemble Germanic RCs ? Are Romance RCs 'true' RCs ?