Another look at the interaction between verbs and constructions

Abstract

Despite the wealth of literature on English resultatives, there still remain a number of issues that have not been squarely addressed. This paper addresses two of them through a case study of resultatives based on wipe. First, while the existence of resultatives with objects not selected by verbs is well-known in the literature (e.g., wipe the crumbs off the table/*wipe the crumbs), few studies have addressed the issue of exactly which entities may appear as non-selected objects. Second, there are resultatives whose form is to be analyzed as a mixture of the verb’s lexically-specified syntactic frame and the syntactic frame of resultatives (e.g. wipe the blade clean on his skin coat), but such resultatives have been neglected in previous studies. In order to find an answer to the first issue, this paper adopts a force-recipient account, according to which the post-verbal NP of a resultative is a force-recipient (cf. Croft 1990, 1991, 1998, 2012). It is shown that non-selected objects like crumbs are indeed force-recipients in a conceptual scene. As for the second issue, such resultatives can be accommodated by means of a constructional analysis which holds that verbs contribute the semantics of the resulting expression, and that argument structure constructions simply enable the verb meaning to take its form. Together, these findings indicate that verbs play a far more important role than argument structure constructions in effecting the syntax and semantics of the resulting expression.