This paper proposes a binary analysis of transitive and
intransitive resultatives such as "the gardener watered the tulips flat"
and "the joggers ran their Nikes threadbare," respectively, in which the
object is either generated in or raised to [Spec, V], depending on whether
the resultative is a SC complement of V with a PRO or lexical subject.
External arguments of verbs are generated in the Spec position of a
functional category ¼, a cover symbol for a category named variously in the
literature 'Pr', 'Voice' and 'Tr', and it is assumed that SCs are projected
from ¼ as well. Syntactic support for this analysis derives from the
possibility of ATB extraction of the verb from conjoined VPs in both
transitive and intransitive resultatives; from the apparent conjunction of
resultatives of different categories; from the fact that resultatives, like
SC complements generally, support floated quantifiers; and from the
anaphoric possibilities of pronouns in fronted resultatives. Semantic
support derives from the fact that the resultative meaning can be derived
compositionally from the proposed structures under appropriate assumptions
concerning q-role assignment. In sharp contrast to the ternary analysis in
Carrier and Randall (1992), the binary analysis leads to the conclusion
that there is a strong isomorphism between semantic structure, argument
structure and syntactic structure. This in turn permits a more restrictive
theory of grammar in which the mapping between semantics, argument
structure and syntax is quite transparent, implying that a child has to
learn very little concerning the mapping between these levels.
