The path argument of resultative constructions

Abstract

The premise of the paper is that resultative constructions involve an abstract Path argument by which the secondary predicate is treated as an endpoint to a path of a change of state/location, rather than a pure state/location. The discussion in this paper revolves around the way in which Ramchand’s (2008) resP, a structural position in the syntactic skeleton of resultative constructions, corresponding to the abstract Path argument, differs in English and in Romanian. The paper offers a unified account of state and location resultatives in light of this abstract argument.

Keywords

• resultative construction
• Path argument
• resP
• English
• Romanian