Towards a hierarchy of resultative constructionstheoretical and empirical issues

Abstract

This paper investigates how linguistic theory can account for the acquisition of the so-called English resultative constructions. It examines the syntactic dichotomies that X-Bar theory poses in their argument structure and puts forward several proposals that give answer to Chomsky’s hypothesis (1981). In particular, it focuses on the ternary branching analysis and the small clause approach. Taking into account the syntactic properties of the resultative phrase (RP), a taxonomy of resultative constructions is displayed (based on Goldberg and Jackendoff, 2004) in order to test how the syntactic status of the RP is acquired by monolingual English children. As confirmed by the empirical data, the degree of syntactic complexity of the RP correlates with the age of acquisition of resultative constructions.