Resultatives, Compositionality and Language Variation

要旨

A comparative analysis of English and Japanese shows that theset of permissible resultatives in Japanese is properly containedin the set of permissible resultatives in English. AlthoughEnglish resultatives naturally divide into transitive andintransitive resultatives (in the sense of Carrier and Randall(1992)), and intransitive resultatives are systematically missingfrom Japanese, it is not exactly this distinction that demarcatesthe English set and the Japanese set since Japanese permits onlycertain types of transitive resultatives, rejecting other typesthat would be possible in English. Languages like French areessentially like Japanese in this respect. Thus, the category"transitive resultatives" needs to be divided into at least twotypes (called here WEAK and STRONG resultatives), and there is anatural class of resultatives comprising strong transitiveresultatives and all intransitive resultatives, the latter beingalways "strong" by the definition of this notion given in thispaper. Certain examples that bear a superficial resemblance toresultatives (called here SUPRIOUS resultatives) are alsodiscussed and shown to constitute a different phenomenon.Finally, the weak/strong distinction is given a specifictheoretical interpretation in terms of the notion "patienthood."The relevance of this interpretation to the Subset Principle isalso briefly discussed.