In search of resultative constructions: a corpus-based comparison of Germanic and Romance languages (Doctoral dissertation, Ghent University).
Creators: name: Métairy, Justine
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2022
Subjects: resultative constructions, contrastive linguistics, corpus linguistics, germanic languages, romance languages, cooking recipes, nomination verbs

description: This thesis investigates Resultative Constructions (or RCs) (e.g. John wiped the floor clean, The vase broke to pieces) within a contrastive Germanic (i.e. Dutch, English) vs. Romance (i.e. French, Spanish) perspective. It is generally considered that, contrary to Germanic languages, Romance languages lack (fully productive) RCs. This alleged restriction is believed to follow from a fundamental typological property, originally introduced in Talmy’s (1985, 1991) pioneering work on complex motion (and result) events: Romance languages are ‘verb-framed’, which means that they tend to encode the path (that is, the goal or the result) of an event in the verbal root (e.g. French: entrer dans la cuisine en trombe, aplatir à coups de marteau; Spanish: entrar en la cocina a toda velocidad, aplanar a martillazos; ‘enter the kitchen like a whirlwind’, ‘flatten with a hammer’). By contrast, Germanic languages are ‘satellite-framed’: in these languages, the path is prototypically encoded in a so-called ‘satellite’, which can be instantiated by a PP (e.g. storm into the kitchen) or an AP (e.g. hammer flat). Nonetheless, although they are admittedly more limited, RCs do seem to exist in Romance. However, the literature dealing with these constructions is characterized by major empirical gaps, which relate to: (i) their frequency, (i) the productivity of the verb slot in terms of aspectual and semantic classes, and (ii) the syntactic openness of the RSP slot (PPs, APs, NPs). Moreover, the question arises as to whether (i) and (ii) are correlated: that is, if the productivity of a specific strategy for encoding the RSP impacts the productivity of the verb slot. The two corpus-based studies conducted during our research aimed to fill these empirical gaps. Chapter 2 offers a very broad, exploratory study of RCs, which charts all instances of the construction in a discourse genre that is particularly open to RCs (viz. cooking recipes, e.g. cut the onion thin/into rings). 4000 occurrences of the construction (i.e. 1000 per language) have been retrieved from our home-made comparable corpus of cooking recipes and thoroughly annotated. Chapter 3 provides a more in-depth analysis of RCs that involve a specific verb class (viz. nomination verbs, e.g. she was appointed professor). First, in an attempt to evaluate the productivity of the verb slot in nomination constructions (or NCs), we analysed a large sample of NCs which contain around 100 different verbs per language, collected from various sources (e.g. previous literature, dictionaries, the Internet). Then, we examined the syntactic, semantic and lexical scope of the RSP slot in NCs involving 4 different verbs by language (i.e. 16 verbs in total), viz. crown, elect, proclaim and promote and their respective cognates in the other languages studied. 200 occurrences of the construction per verb were retrieved from Sketch Engine (that is, 3200 in total).