Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics (Jan 2009)
Some differences between English and Romanian resultative constructions
Abstract
It is a generally accepted fact that Romance languages behave differently from English and other Germanic languages as far as the building of resultative constructions is concerned. The wide availability of resultatives in English is in sharp contrast with their less frequent occurrence in Romanian; not to mention the view according to which there are no such constructions in Romanian at all. In the present paper we focus our attention on some differences between the resultatives in English and Romanian. Most importantly, English resultatives can be built on activity, as well as accomplishment matrix verbs; whereas Romanian allows only resultatives built on accomplishment verbs. This approach is consonant with Kayne’s (2005) theory about the existence/non-existence of silent elements in the two (families of) languages; we explain this difference between the two languages in terms of the presence/absence of a silent UP TO element.
