Depictives

Resultative and Depictive Constructions in English*

Chang-Su Lee
Department of English Language Education

I. Introduction

The following illustrates two types of secondary predication, the resultative and the depictive construction:
(1)

a. John hammered the metal flat. (Resultative Construction) b. John ate the meat raw. (Depietive Construction)

In (la), the adjective flat, called a resultative, a result phrase, or a resultative predicate, describes the final state of the object NP which results from the action or process denoted by the verb. Thus (la) means "John caused the metal to become flat by hammering it." On the other hand, in (lb) the adjective raw, called a depictive, a depictive phrase, or a depictive predicate, characterizes the state of an NP at the time of the initiation of the main predicate's action." So the sentence (lb) has the meaning "John ate the meat, and at the time he ate it, it was raw." Many ltngutsts have assumed that the resultative and the depictive construction are not syntactically different despite their difference in semantic interpretation (cf. Rapoport, 1990). In this paper, however, we propose that the resultative and the depietive construction involve two different types of syntactic configuration.

*This paper is the summarized version of Lee's Ph.D. Thesis. 1) "Resultative" and "depletive" may be used to indicate a resultative and a depictive sentence. respectively.

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THE SNU JOURNAL OF EDUCATION RESEARCH

II. Syntactic Status of Resultatives and Depictives
In the literature, it is generally assumed that resultatives and depictives are predicates (Hoekstra, 1984, 1988; Rothstein, 1985; Rapoport, 1990; Napoli, 1992). Let's consider the following examples:

(2) a. John cut her hair [short]. b. Jack left her house [furious].
In the above two sentences, there are two predicates, the primary one (the main verb) and a secondary one, in brackets, in the sense of Rothstein (1985). In the resultative