A Reconsideration Of The Syntactic Structure Of The English Resultative Construction

The English resultative construction is an important but complex linguisticphenomenon, and it is also the research focus in the framework of GenerativeGrammar, Semantics, Construction Grammar and so on. In syntax, linguists haven’treached a unified explanation on the syntactic structure of the English resultativeconstruction. Moreover, there are no systematic analyses of the syntactic status of theresultative predicate and the syntactic properties of the resultative construction.Therefore, a syntactic study on the English resultative construction is worthexploring.This thesis reanalyzes the syntactic structure of the English resultativeconstruction under the framework of transformational-generative grammar, at thesame time, discusses the syntactic status of the resultative predicate deeply. At thevery beginning, according to the transitivity of the matrix verb in the Englishresultative construction, this thesis defines the resultative construction into threetypes along two dimentions: transitive or unergative and unaccusative resultativeconstruction. Then, this thesis summarizes the research of the previous studies, andpoints out the shortcomings of their studies, which provides a breakthrough for thenew interpretation program. To explain the derivation of the resultative construction,phrase structure theory, the principle of economy and Minimalist Program are thetheoretical bases of this research. On the basis of the Necessary and SufficientConditions, the thesis demonstrates the basic logic frame of human language, andthen explains the syntactic structure of the resultative construction, furthermore, fixesthe resultative predicte as an adjunct of the matrix verb. The matrix verb and theresultative predicate encode into a new complex predicate in the lexical level.Based on the principle of economy and the basic logic frame of human language,this thesis provides a relatively unified interpretation of the syntactic study on the English resultative construction.