Semantics-oriented resultatives: Evidence from valency alternation verbs

Resultative phrases are generally believed to conform to the Direct Object Restriction: that is, they describe the direct object if verbs are transitive. However, some exceptions have occasionally been reported, and this paper investigates the problem by focusing on resultative phrases that occur with the valency alternation verbs in Japanese and Mandarin Chinese. Verbs that license the locative alternation and locatum-subject alternation describe events that involve two arguments, the location and the locatum, which are perceived to concurrently undergo a change of state. It will be shown that resultative phrases with a valency alternation verb can be predicated of either argument regardless of whether it is expressed as direct object. Furthermore, resultative verbal suffixes in Mandarin, interpreted as description of either the location or the locatum, give rise to the locative alternation while their interpretation remains the same. Thus, it is claimed that in Japanese and Mandarin, the predication relation of resultative phrases is not determined by the grammatical function of arguments as generally believed, but rather by the lexical semantics of the verbs.

On interpretation of resultatives with locative alternation verbs

Resultative phrases in Japanese are generally believed to be predicated of the object of transitive verbs just like English counterparts (e.g., I painted the car yellow). However, some exceptions are also known in which resultatives describe an oblique argument (e.g., otoko-wa kabe-ni penki-o akaku nutta ‘the man smeared paint on the wall (so that the wall became) red)'. Using BCCWJ-NT corpus data, this paper shows that resultatives with locative alternation verbs in Japanese are generally interpreted as description of the argument that is lexically specified to undergo a change of state, rather than of the direct object.

Alternacja lokatywna w wybranych leksykalnych bazach danych

The object of interest in this paper is verbs describing situations where substances or objects are being removed from a surface. Such verbs are characterised by being subject to locative alternation, which could be exemplifi ed by constructions such as: Dozorca zamiata śmieci z ulicy. → Dozorca zamiata ulicę (ze śmieci) (The caretaker is sweeping litter from the street. → The caretaker is sweeping the street (to remove litter)). The phenomenon of alternation consists in regular variantivity in the syntactic manifestation of verb arguments, whereas locative alternation, according to Beth Levin, concerns at least two manners of expressing arguments assuming the following properties: 1. ‘an object changing its location’ (locatum argument), and 2. ‘a location’ (location argument) in a sentence (Levin 1993: 50). The principal objective of the paper is to discuss whether and how locative alternation is taken into account and described in selected Polish-, English-, and Russian-language specialist lexicographic publications, such as: the Valence Dictionary (Walenty), FrameNet, and Leksykograf (Lexicographer), a base of Russian verbs. The analysis is also aimed to answer the question if the alternating syntactic structures reveal any change in the communicated content and, more specifi cally, in the manner of illustrating a given situation.

On locative alternation verbs in Mandarin Chinese

This paper focuses on both single and compound locative alternation verbs in Mandarin Chinese. First, three particular properties of locative alternation verbs are introduced and compared cross-linguistically with examples from Japanese and English. Next, three properties are explored further and possible explanations are provided for the observed similarities and differences between the languages. Finally, the syntactic patterns of locative alternation verbs in Mandarin Chinese are investigated in the Sinica Corpus. The results show that the “oblique argument-verb-accusative argument” sentence pattern has the highest percentage of appearance. This finding echoes Lin’s (2008) claim that Chinese is not only a “topic prominent” language, but also a “locative prominent” language.

Priming semantic structure in Brazilian Portuguese

Structural priming, the tendency for speakers to reuse previously encountered sentence structures, provides some of the strongest evidence for the existence of abstract structural representations in language. In the present research, we investigate the priming of semantic structure in Brazilian Portuguese using the locative alternation: A menina lustrou a mesa com o verniz “The girl rubbed the table with the polish” vs. A menina lustrou o verniz na mesa “The girl rubbed the polish on the table.” On the surface, both locative variants have the same syntactic structure: NP-V-NP-PP. However, location-theme locatives (“rub table with polish” describe a caused-change-of-state event, while theme-location locatives (“rub polish on table”) describe a caused-change-of-location event. We find robust priming on the basis of these semantic differences. This work extends our knowledge by demonstrating that semantic structural priming is not isolated to languages like English (e.g., satellite-framed with strict word order and limited inflection) but is present in a language with very different typological characteristics (e.g., verb-framed and richly inflected with subject dropping).