Resultatives
December is traditionally a month for looking back. I have been looking back quite far for an abstract on causative motion for a conference in Paris next year . During my PhD, I collected data on both non-causative motion (Robin ran out of the house) and causative motion (Alice threw the book out the window), but I never did anything with the causative data. If the abstract is accepted, maybe I can finally do something with it. Coding things up for the abstract lead me to go even further back. Among the causative motion sentences selected from my parallel corpus, I included a resultative: " A large rose-tree stood near the entrance of the garden: the roses growing on it were white, but there were three gardeners at it, busily painting them red . " (from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll) To paint something red is a resultative construction :). Resultatives were the topic of my MA thesis completed now seven years ago, and they have always kept a spe...