Towards a Hierarchy of Resultative Constructions: Theoretical and Empirical Issues
Abstract
This paper investigates how linguistic theory can account for the acquisition of the so-called resultative constructions. It examines the syntactic and semantic dichotomies that X-Bar theory poses in their argument structure and puts forward several proposals that give answer to Chomsky’s hypothesis (1981). In particular, it focuses on the ternary branching analysis and the small clause approach. Moreover, a taxonomy of resultative constructions is displayed which, as confirmed by our empirical data, their degree of syntactic complexity correlates with their stages in acquisition in monolingual English children.
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