Strong and weak resultatives with result roots in English and Spanish
Smith, Ryan W. (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey)
Ausensi, Josep (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
Yu, Jianrong (Independent Researcher)

Data:	2026
Resum:	We consider a subclass of result verbs in Rappaport Hovav & Levin's (2010) sense built on roots that entail change (Beavers & Koontz-Garboden, 2020), e. g. , break, melt, explode, and tear. We argue that this class of roots possesses different grammatical properties between English and Spanish with respect to resultative constructions: these roots productively appear in both strong and weak resultatives in English but form only weak resultatives in Spanish (Washio, 1997). We propose an account of this asymmetry between the two languages rooted in differences in the semantic properties of the root class and independent differences in the inventory of prepositional heads available in each language: English possesses eventive change of state roots and eventive prepositions that express change of location/state, while their Spanish equivalents are stative, with the roots entailing change of state. This suggests that translational equivalents of roots across languages may differ in their grammatical properties and, therefore, possess different distributions in other constructions despite contributing the same conceptual content.
Ajuts:	Agencia Estatal de Investigación PID2022-136610NB-I00 Agencia Estatal de Investigación PID2023-150846NA-C33
Drets:	Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, la comunicació pública de l'obra i la creació d'obres derivades, fins i tot amb finalitats comercials, sempre i quan es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original.
Llengua:	Anglès
Document:	Article ; recerca ; Versió publicada
Matèria:	Resultatives ; Talmy's typology ; Event structure ; Manner ; Result ; Spanish ; English
Publicat a:	Isogloss, Vol. 12, Num. 1 (2026) , p. 1-40 (Articles) , ISSN 2385-4138

Adreça original: https://revistes.uab.cat/isogloss/article/view/v12-n1-smith-ausensi-yu
DOI: 10.5565/rev/isogloss.631

40 p, 444.1 KB

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