Stefan Müller: Phrasal or Lexical Resultative Constructions?

Starting in the nineties more and more linguistic articles were published in the framework of Construction Grammar. Although Kay and Fillmore (1999, p. 19) made it clear that Constructions are not necessarily phrasal, most of the authors suggest phrasal Constructions. This is especially apparent in Construction Grammar-inspired work in the framework of HPSG.

In this paper, I show that the difference between phrasal approaches and lexical approaches is not as big as it is sometimes claimed, but that the decision for one of the approaches nevertheless may have serious consequences. The discussion focuses on resultative constructions, a phenomenon for which both phrasal and lexical analyses were suggested. I show that an enormous amount of different Constructions is needed to account for all patterns that may arise because of reordering of constituents or realization of the resultative construction in connection with valence changing processes. It will be shown that adjuncts, predicate complexes, and derivational morphology pose considerable problems for the phrasal approach, while they are unproblematic for lexical rule-based approaches.

• The paper appeared in Language (Download)
• Toc of the proceedings