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On the expression of resultativity in English: The view from multiple resultatives

Paper · 2024 · Josep Ausensi, Ryan Walter Smith and Jianrong Yu

Summary

This theoretical semantics paper examines English clauses in which a single entity receives two result phrases, such as Cappelle's example of a guard shooting someone dead and off a horse. These cases seem to violate the Unique Path Constraint (Goldberg 1991), which allows a theme only one result state per clause. The authors propose that such multiple resultatives encode a nested chain of causes: the verb's manner event produces the first state, and that state produces the second. They formalise this with a compositional rule of Causative Formation, which connects the second result phrase to the first through a cause relation. They compare this with the account of Ausensi & Bigolin (2021), which treats the second phrase as a low depictive, and argue that it predicts the wrong timing and causal links between the eventualities. The evidence combines constructed sentences with attested examples from the web, GloWbE and COCA. The main conclusion is that there is no independent one-result limit. Classic counterexamples fail because world knowledge says the first state cannot plausibly bring about the second.

Key points

  • The core analysis is a causal chain: manner event → result state 1 → result state 2, built with Causative Formation (in the tradition of Dowty 1979, Bittner 1999, Kratzer 2005, Williams 2015).
  • The rival low-depictive analysis of Ausensi & Bigolin (2021) is rejected because it misdescribes when and why the second state holds.
  • The UPC and related proposals are discussed and denied the status of semantic constraints. These include Tenny's single-delimiter generalization, the Single Delimiting Constraint and Tortora's Further Specification Constraint, with telic in- versus atelic for-phrases serving as telicity diagnostics.
  • The appendix lists attested data from Web, GloWbE and COCA in two groups:
    • manner verbs with an AP plus a PP (e.g. "nail flat into the wood");
    • result verbs with an unrelated result (cheese melting out of a burger, ropes burned loose).
  • The impossibility of stacked AP results (*beat the man bloody unconscious) gets a syntactic explanation: the second result phrase is the AP's complement, and an AP apparently cannot take another AP as its complement.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. When two result phrases attach to one object, model them as a sequence where the first state causes the second, not as two parallel attributes; this yields an ordering and a causal link for free.
  • I2. Judge whether a state combination is acceptable by asking if state A can plausibly cause state B according to world knowledge, instead of applying a hard count limit.
  • I3. Keep a categorial syntactic restriction (no AP complement inside an AP) separate from the semantic causal requirement, so each failure has its own named reason.
  • I4. Tell resultative from depictive readings of secondary predicates by their predictions: a resultative state arises after and because of the event, while a depictive state merely holds during it.
  • I5. The paper's starred textbook examples contrast neatly with attested corpus counterparts, giving minimal pairs of possible versus impossible double results.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (world): When building the world of the text, add result 2 as a later state caused by result 1, so "how/why" questions about the final state can trace back through the chain.
  • I2 (world): Compiled knowledge of which states can cause which others (e.g. unconsciousness → no; position change ← impact → yes) can act as an explainable plausibility filter on candidate result readings.
  • I3 (tree): The parser should still produce trees for odd stacked phrases and record the category clash as a labelled diagnostic, leaving the semantic verdict to later stages.
  • I4 (frames): When mapping xcomp/obl dependents to frames, tag each secondary predicate as RESULT or DEPICTIVE and attach the matching temporal/causal relation, checked with in-/for-phrase telicity cues.
  • I5 (learn): Use such pairs as negative controls in evaluation, so that the frame and world stages are checked for rejecting implausible causal chains as well as for accepting good ones.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of ManchesterManchester · United Kingdom87 works · 44,938 citations🎓University of AlicanteAlicante · Spain21 works · 1,098 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 5The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksPsychology · 1,552 worksExperimental and Cognitive Psychology · 870 worksDevelopmental and Educational Psychology · 499 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 works

Cite

Cite as Josep Ausensi, Ryan Walter Smith and Jianrong Yu. 2024. On the expression of resultativity in English: The view from multiple resultatives. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.16995/glossa.11126

@article{ausensi2024expression,
  title = {{On the expression of resultativity in English: The view from multiple resultatives}},
  author = {Josep Ausensi, Ryan Walter Smith and Jianrong Yu},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.16995/glossa.11126},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.11126}
}

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