John hammered the metal flat. The river froze solid. John sneezed the tissue off the table. John laughed himself silly.
Manner of motion verbs are a group of semantically similar verbs which can be defined as follows (Levin 1993:264):
These verbs describe motion that typically, though not necessarily, involves displacement, but none of them specifies an inherent direction as part of its meaning. All of these verbs have meanings that include a notion of manner or means of motion. They differ from each other in terms of the specific manner or means.These verbs can be extended to a directed motion use, in which an ``inherent direction'' is contributed via a path prepositional phrase. Examples of standard and extended uses of some of these verbs appear in res60-res61.
John swam. John swam across the pool.
John ran. John ran to the school.
In most existing work on resultatives that I am aware of (Levin and Rappaport Hovav levin_rh:95, Wechsler , Markantonatou and Sadler marks_sadler:95, inter alia -- exceptions are Jackendoff jack:90 and Goldberg goldberg:95), manner of motion verbs on a directed motion sense are treated as resultative constructions due to the result-like quality of the directional PP (i.e. the PP seems to introduce a result state: in res60b John is at the other end of the pool, and in res61b John is at school). The syntactic form of the directed motion use of manner of motion verbs, however, differs from the standard form of resultatives for unergative verbs (verbs which have only an underlying subject, including sneeze and laugh in res35). Instead, they pattern with unaccusative verbs (verbs which have an underlying object but not subject, like freeze and break: The river froze, The glass broke) although they are not normally considered to be unaccusative. This difference poses a challenge to uniform explanatory theories of the resultative construction.
In this chapter I will investigate the syntactic and semantic properties of the resultative construction, arguing that they are distinct from the properties associated with manner of motion verbs and that a uniform analysis cannot explain the distinctions. I will look specifically at the unaccusativity-based proposals of Levin and Rappaport Hovav (1995) (henceforth L&RH), and will expose problems with the evidence for their analysis of the manner of motion verbs, and will introduce issues that their account fails to address adequately. In particular I will show that semantic differences between the manner of motion verbs on a directed motion use and other resultatives fail to be captured by a uniform treatment. I will also examine a semantic solution to the modeling of the resultative construction proposed by Wechsler (), concluding that his intuitions are generally accurate and moreover point to a non-syntactic explanation for unaccusativity. In contrast to Wechsler, however, I will suggest that the behaviour of verbs in the resultative construction stems from a combination of the semantics of the construction, lexicalisation of certain forms, and contextual constraints. Moreover, I will argue for a non-resultative treatment of the manner of motion verbs with a directional phrase complement.
I will end with an alternative explanation of the manner of motion verbs data, and resultative constructions in general, drawing on work done in the framework of Construction Grammar (Goldberg 1995). This proposal will obviate the need for the unaccusative/unergative distinction within the analysis of resultatives and will clearly differentiate the treatment of manner of motion verbs from true resultatives. It will be formalised in terms of the representations outlined in Chapter 2, and with the lexical rule mechanisms described in Chapter 3.
I will also argue throughout the chapter that the data in question cannot be considered in isolation of pragmatic reasoning, and that the felicity of a particular sentence depends on its coherence in the discourse it appears in. I will provide a tentative proposal for how discourse coherence constrains the interpretation of the data. I will show how an acknowledgement of the influence of lexical conventionalisation and pragmatic reasoning can lead to a fuller account of the data.