An Event-Frame-Based Approach To English Resultative Constructions

The English resultative construction has been a focus of study from syntactic, semantic and pragmatic perspectives by many linguists such as Chomsky, Levin, Rappaport, Goldberg and Boas. Based on event-frame semantics theory, this thesis adopts a pragmatic perspective to reanalyze five types of English resultative constructions: causative property resultative, noncausative property resulative, noncausative path resultative, causative path reultative and and"time"away construction in order to find out the formation mechanism of the English resultative construction.As a distinctive construction, the English resulative construction possesses its syntactic and semantic properties which can not be stricltly predicted from its component parts or from previously established constructions. This thesis mainly concentrates on the semantics and function of the verbs of the above five types of resultative constructions and the distribution of event participants: agent, patient and resultative phrase. The major findings of my study are shown as follws: Firstly, a usage-based analysis of resultatives shows that the English resultative construction conveys a speaker's certain perspective toward a certain thing, that is, the result state of the patient. To a great extent, each verb in the resultative construction is conventionally linked with a sentence pattern or some patterns. What's more, the lexical licensing of resultatives reveals that speakers adopt event frame semantcs to license the distribution of resultative constructions. Lastly, as for conventional resultatives, correspondence relation between the event frame of verbs and the syntactic structure is licensed directly by verbs'event frame semantics while the licensing of non-conventional resultativs depends on an analogy that the speaker bridges between conventional resultatives and non-conventional resulatives.