John danced across the room. The girls giggled down the hallway.
The wise men followed the star out of Bethlehem. The sailors rode a breeze clear of the rocks.
John danced mazurkas across the room. John walked the dog to the store. John swam laps to exhaustion. The children played leapfrog across the park.
Secondly, the meaning of these constructions differs enormously from that of Resultatives: (a) there is no element of causation in the meaning, as has been discussed in Section 4.3.1 and above, (b) the goal phrase is restricted by the semantics of the verb which it appears with, as will become more clear below, (c) the shift of a manner of motion verb to a directed motion use can be induced by context (as argued in Section 4.2.2), and (d) there is not necessarily a change of location or state to an explicit endpoint. Whether such a change is inferred depends on the semantics of the goal phrase alone.
I propose a compositional account in which the goal phrases are
treated as pseudo-complements for the treatment of these
cases (see Chapter 3).
. In
particular, the manner of motion verbs will be assumed to encode the
potential for a path argument in their lexical semantics and the
unaccusative verbs a specific final state.
Sentences such as those in resalt15 are actually ambiguous due to
the availability of modification by both pseudo-complements and
`standard' adjuncts: for resalt15a the reading in which the
prepositional phrase is a pseudo-complement has the interpretation
John is across the room as a result of John dancing, while the
reading in which it is an adjunct has the meaning John is located
across the room, and he is dancing. Similarly, it is possible to have a
sentence which contains both a pseudo-complement and a true adjunctive
use of the same preposition, as in resalt18a. Notice that the syntactic position
of a pseudo-complement is restricted to immediately follow the verb's
subcategorised elements. So resalt18b is not possible on the
interpretation on which the PP in the store specifies the path of
the running rather than the location and in Washington specifies
a location of the running. The sentences in resalt31 also reflect
this syntactic constraint.
John ran in the store in Washington. *John ran in Washington in the store.
*John ran in the park to the store. ??John ran in twenty minutes to the store.
Verb-modifying adjective phrases inherently behave as pseudo-complements. They convey a state or property which is relevant to some entity, not an event as a whole, and as such can only be perceived as modifying an argument internal to the verb semantics. That their behaviour parallels that of certain goal phrases therefore becomes clear.