Download 1 Lexical-Constructional Subsumption in Resultative Constructions

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 adequate 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 undergone 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 constructionist (e.g. Boas 2002, 2003, 2005, 2008ab; Broccias 2003, 2004; Goldberg 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 information on the developments of the LCM, we refer the reader to the webpage
<www.lexicom.es>.
118
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 approach to resultatives, i.e. one where the syntactic configuration is motivated by the principled interaction between lexical and constructional
structure. 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 causedmotion 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 considered an extended use. The caused-motion construction has been discussed in the literature in relation to resultative constructions and construction 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, according 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.
Lexical-Constructional Subsumption in Resultative Constructions
119
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. Following Goldberg (1995) constructions have often been described as “formmeaning pairings” where the whole exceeds the sum of the parts. However, quite recently, the notion of construction has been broadened to encompass 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 criticism on the basis that the resulting definition is too unconstrained (cf. Bod
2009, Östman and Fried 2004, among others). The LCM regards constructions as form-meaning pairings where form realizes semantic (or conceptual) structure and, in so doing, cues for the activation of conceptual structure. 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 causedmotion 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 constructions 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 unreasonable
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 circumstances 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 not only capa-
120
Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibañez & Alba Luzondo Oyón
ble of contributing arguments (observe that sneeze is actually an intransitive verb, and therefore the Y and Z arguments are supplied by the causedmotion construction in this example), but also of creating semantic 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 descriptive 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; Michaelis
2003) is invoked in this connection. The argument here is that lexicalconstructional fusion is generally possible if there is conceptual compatibility 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-constructional fusion (a process which in the model is referred to as subsumption, thus capturing the fact that lexical structure may be altered to be adapted to constructional structure but not the other way around).
The present paper aims to examine in detail lexical-constructional fusion 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 configuration, 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
Lexical-Constructional Subsumption in Resultative Constructions
121
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 amalgams of cognitive models as well as the principles that license their combination.
2. The Goldbergian approach to resultatives
When analyzing the connections that hold between verbs and constructions, Goldberg (1995, 2006) associates lexical items with rich frame semantic meanings. Hence, once constructions are decomposed into abstract
predicate-argument structures such as CAUSE-BECOME <agt pat resultgoal> 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 constructionspecific constraints to predicate fusion. However, in such a fully constructionist 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 burden 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 prevents the fusion of most of these predicates with the resultative construction?
(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 resultative construction, and thus both the role of constructions as well as
that of predicates should be observed and explained when dealing with the
122
Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibañez & Alba Luzondo Oyón
complex issue of lexical-constructional subsumption. But to Boas’s examples, 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 accounted 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 number
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 morphosyntactic 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 argument
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-
Lexical-Constructional Subsumption in Resultative Constructions
123
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 capable 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 subcategorial conversion processes, as well as some constructional alternations (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 uncountable 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 begin
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 office,
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 another 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 metonymies of
this kind are based on generic cognitive models such as ‘action’, ‘result’,
‘entity’, ‘property’, they are usually labelled “high-level” metaphor and
metonymy.
In the LCM high-level metaphor and metonymy are viewed as (external) constraining factors on lexical-constructional fusion. Other (constrained) cognitive processes such as conceptual cueing (i.e. a form of
guided inferential activity) and constructional subsumption (i.e. the incorporation of lower level constructions, such as lexical templates, into higher
124
Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibañez & Alba Luzondo Oyón
level ones) are also contemplated in the model. For the sake of clarification, 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 nonartificial 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 activities, 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 Grammar,
that subcategorial conversion is partially a consequence of the Override
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 accomplishment
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 interpretation 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 metaphor AN EXPERIENTIAL ACTION IS AN EFFECTUAL ACTION to account for this phenomenon. Logically, such a metaphor imposes constraints on lexicalconstructional subsumption by licensing, as in (6) and (7), or blocking, as
in (8), subcategorial conversion of other “experiential action” predicates:
(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/.
Lexical-Constructional Subsumption in Resultative Constructions
125
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 impossible 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 alternations 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 lexical 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 identification 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 existence of this motion subevent licenses the incorporation into the construction 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.
126
Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibañez & Alba Luzondo Oyón
3.3. Lexical class constraint
Compare the use of the verbs break and destroy in the following sentences 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 destroyed’ (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 cessation of existence, which prevents it from being subsumed into the inchoative 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 characterized by presenting an action as if it were a process. The action is recoverable 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 component 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 construction once again. If we attempt to make kill participate in such a configuration, this internal constraint will block this process out since kill already
Lexical-Constructional Subsumption in Resultative Constructions
127
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 instantiating element that we can have for a constructional argument. Consider 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 element 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 infelicitous 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 ‘drivecrazy’ sense of the verb drive tends to denote a negative mental state,
which is why it collocates with mad, to madness, to distraction, insane,
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 analytical 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.
128
Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibañez & Alba Luzondo Oyón
4. The LCM approach to resultatives
In our view, the account of internal and external constraints on lexicalconstructional subsumption provided by the LCM contains a number of
explanatory tools that prove useful to account for the intricacies of resultative 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 underlying 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 action denoted by the predicate, an entity A acquires a new quality but ultimately 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 involves 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 resultative 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 possible)” (Broccias 2003: 157). According to him, this means that resultative
Lexical-Constructional Subsumption in Resultative Constructions
129
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 entity (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, Broccias’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
apply 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 although 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 necessarily 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
130
Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibañez & Alba Luzondo Oyón
human controlled activity, but an inherent (although subjectively ascribed)
property of some entities. One can beautify an environment by, for example, 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 activity (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 acquisition 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/inchoative 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 excess 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 construal 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 possi-
Lexical-Constructional Subsumption in Resultative Constructions
131
bility of using some resultative configurations as part of inchoative constructions, as shown in (18a), and all cases of change-of-state verbal predicates, 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 metonymic 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 consciousness (A>A’).
This sentence encodes an A > A’ schema (typical of canonical resultative 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 motivation 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 reality. 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 effector; (ii)
an affected object, and (iii) a reaction of the affected object expressed 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 causedmotion construction requires a verbal predicate that expresses 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 highlevel metonymy PROCESS FOR ACTION whereby the direct object becomes a
subject, while the true agent becomes latent. In relation to the internal con-
132
Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibañez & Alba Luzondo Oyón
straints signalled by the LCM, more specifically the lexical 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 information 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 predicate 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 depression.
The verb in (20a) is subsumed into the canonical resultative construction, 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 standard effect described in (20a) (i.e. ‘getting drunk’ plus its associated consequences of losing consciousness or acting in a silly way). In all these cases, the
patient still undergoes an A > A’ process achieved through a figurative use
of the caused-motion configuration. Further note that for sentences 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 resultative 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.
Lexical-Constructional Subsumption in Resultative Constructions
133
d. ?He drank himself depressed.
Even though they are possible, corpus data only shows a few occurrences for cases like (21b) and (21d), thus indicating that, since we understand the patient as metaphorically moving into another state, the causedmotion 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 conditioning, 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 lexicalconstructional 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 lexical-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 construction. We have sorted out the flaws through the specification of sets of internal and external constraints on the fusion process.
References
Boas, Hans C. 2002. On the role of semantic constraints in resultative constructions. In Linguistics on the Way into the New Millennium, Vol. 1,
ed. Reinhard Rapp, 35–44. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
––. 2003. A Constructional Approach to Resultatives. Stanford: Stanford
Monographs in Linguistics.
––. 2005. Determining the productivity of resultative constructions: A reply to Goldberg & Jackendoff. Language 81.2: 448–464.
––. 2008a. Resolving form-meaning discrepancies in Construction Grammar. In Constructional Reorganization, ed. Jaakko Leino, 11–36. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
134
Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibañez & Alba Luzondo Oyón
––. 2008b. Determining the structure of lexical entries and grammatical
constructions in Construction Grammar. Annual Review of Cognitive
Linguistics 6: 113–144.
Bod, Rens. 2009. Constructions at work or at rest? Cognitive Linguistics
20.1: 129–134.
Broccias, Cristiano. 2003. The English Change Network. Berlin and New
York: Mouton de Gruyter.
––. 2004. The cognitive basis of adjectival and adverbial resultative constructions. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 2: 103–126.
Butler, Christopher S. 2009. The Lexical Constructional Model: Genesis,
strengths and challenges. In Deconstructing Constructions, ed. Christopher S. Butler, and Javier Martín Arista, 117–152. Amsterdam and
Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Dik, Simon. C. 1997. The Theory of Functional Grammar: The Structure
of the Clause. Berlin and New York: Mouton the Gruyter.
Eddington, David, and Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez. 2010. Argument constructions and language processing: evidence from a priming experiment and pedagogical implications. In Fostering Language
Teaching Efficiency through Cognitive Linguistics, ed. by Sabine De
Knop, Frank Boers, and Teun De Rycker. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Goldberg, Adele. E. 1995. Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
––. 2006. Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalizations in Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goldberg, Adele. E., and Ray Jackendoff. 2004. The English resultative as
a family of constructions. Language 80.3: 532–568.
Gonzálvez-García, Francisco. 2008. Towards a constructionist, usagebased reappraisal of interpersonal manipulation in secondary predication in English and Spanish. Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 57
(“Grammar, Constructions and Interfaces”): 109–136.
Halliday, Michael A. K. 1967. Notes on transitivity and theme in English,
Part I. Journal of Linguistics 3.1: 37-81.
Hoekstra, Teun. 1988. Small clause results. Lingua 74: 101–137.
Iwata, Seizi. 2006. Argument resultatives and adjunct resultatives in a lexical constructional account: The case of resultatives with adjectival result phrases. Language Sciences 28: 449–496.
Kövecses, Zoltan, and Günter Radden. 1998. Metonymy: developing a
cognitive linguistic view. Cognitive Linguistics 9: 37–77.
Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. Chicago:
Chicago University Press.
Lexical-Constructional Subsumption in Resultative Constructions
135
––. 1993. The contemporary theory of metaphor. In Metaphor and
Thought, 2nd ed., ed. Andrew Ortony, 202–251. Cambridge, Mass.:
Cambridge University Press.
––, and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh. New York: Basic
Books.
Langacker, Ronald W. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar: Volume
1: Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press.
Levin, Beth. 1993. English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary
Investigation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mairal Usón, Ricardo, and Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez. 2008.
New challenges for lexical representation within the LexicalConstructional Model. Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 57: 137–
158.
––. 2009. Levels of description and explanation in meaning construction.
In Deconstructing Constructions, ed. Christopher S. Butler and Javier
Martín Arista, 153–198. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
––, and Pamela Faber. 2007. Lexical templates within a functional cognitive theory of meaning. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 5:
137–172.
Michaelis, Laura. 2003. Word meaning, sentence meaning, and syntactic
meaning. In Cognitive Linguistics Research. Cognitive Approaches to
Lexical Semantics, ed. Hubert Cuyckens, René Dirven, and John R.
Taylor, 163–209. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Östman, Jan-Ola, and Mirjam Fried. 2004. Historical and intellectual
background of Construction grammar. In Construction Grammar in a
cross-language perspective, ed. Miriam Fried, Jan-Ola Östman, 1-10.
Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Peña Cervel, Sandra, and Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez. 2009.
The metonymic and metaphoric grounding of two image-schema transformations. In Metonymy and Metaphor in Grammar, ed. Klaus-Uwe
Panther, Linda Thornburg, and Antonio Barcelona, 339–361. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, Francisco José, and Lorena Pérez Hernández.
2001. Metonymy and the grammar: motivation, constraints and interaction. Language and Communication 21.4: 321–357.
––, and Ricardo Mairal Usón. 2007. High-level metaphor and metonymy
in meaning construction. In Aspects of Meaning Construction in Lexicon and Grammar, ed. Günter Radden, Klaus-Michael Köpcke,
Thomas Berg, and Peter Siemund, 33–49. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
136
Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibañez & Alba Luzondo Oyón
––. 2008. Levels of description and constraining factors in meaning construction: an introduction to the Lexical Constructional Model. Folia
Linguistica 42.2: 355–400.
––. 2011. Constraints on syntactic alternation: lexical-constructional subsumption in the Lexical-Constructional Model. In Morphosyntactic Alternations in English. Functional and Cognitive Perspectives, ed. Pilar
Guerrero, 62-82. London, UK and Oakville, CT: Equinox.
––, and Sandra Peña Cervel. 2008. Gramatical metonymy within the ‘action’ frame in English and Spanish. In Current Trends in Contrastive
Linguistics: Functional and Cognitive Perspectives, ed. María de los
Ángeles Gómez-González, Lachlan Mackenzie, and Elsa GonzálezÁlvarez, 251–280. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Schönelfeld, Doris. 2006. Constructions. Special Volume 1: Constructions
All Over: Case Studies and Theoretical Implications. SV1-1.
Van Valin, Jr. Robert D. 2005. The Syntax-Semantics-Pragmatics Interface: An Introduction to Role and Reference Grammar. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.