Tuesday, January 17, 2017

Resultatives

Resultatives are forms that express a change in state as the result of the completion of an event. They appear as predicates of sentences.Resultatives usually consist of a verb, a postverbal noun phrase and a resultative phrase.

The following are examples of resultatives:

He painted the fence white.
She wore her hair up.
He made the curry very spicy.
The door swung open.
The dog licked the bowl clean.

In the example The door swung open the structure consists of a verb and a resultative phrase. This structure is also common in resultatives.

Resultatives are used to form a wide range of sentences. The term is commonly used in linguistics. In the sentence He painted the fence white it is understood that the fence was previously a colour other than white. In resultatives the noun phrase undergoes a change of state.

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