Tying events tight: A reply to Iwata (2006)

The aim of this paper is to offer some counterarguments to Iwata’s (2006) claim that 26 Broccias’s (2003) analysis of resultative constructions cannot account for the differences 27 between what Iwata calls Type A resultatives and Type B resultatives. Type A resultatives 28 involve non-telic predicates (e.g. The joggers ran the pavement thin) while Type B resulta- 29 tives involve telic predicates (e.g. He slid the door shut). Iwata contends that various prop- 30 erties of Type B resultatives – viz. the impossibility of a causal paraphrase, the occurrence 31 of multiple resultative phrases, implicit host predication and the similarity with phrasal 32 verbs – follow from the adjunct and non-path status of the (adjectival) resultative phrase 33 in Type B. Since these assumptions are not made by Broccias (2003), Iwata argues that 34 Broccias’s model is unable to capture the peculiar properties of Type B resultatives. In fact, 35 I contend that Iwata’s theory is based on questionable assumptions and that Broccias’s the- 36 ory is compatible with Iwata’s observations without the need to invoke any of its concep- 37 tual machinery. In particular, I argue that (i) the impossibility of a causal paraphrase does 38 not imply the absence of a causal component in the conceptual representation of Type B 39 resultatives, (ii) the similarity with phrasal verbs is not limited to Type B resultatives, 40 (iii) implicit host predication is a by-product of the semantics of (some) of the verbs used 41 in Type B resultatives, (iv) the co-occurrence of multiple telic events within a resultative 42 clause is due to their nature as different but tightly linked facets of a complex event.