ABSTRACT
The structures known as resultatives in the technical literature have an action reading, denoted in the main verb, alongside with a resultant state denoted in an AP over a DP, as seen in the data from German: (i) Der Wolf hat das Haus kaputt geblasen - the wolf has the house damaged blown - ‘the wolf blew so that the house ended up damaged’. The first goal of this work is to empirically demonstrate (via crosslinguistic tests) that the resultative construction is highly productive in West Germanic languages, whereas inexistent (holding the same structure) in Brazilian Portuguese (i.e. *O lobo assoprou a casa estragada - The wolf blew the house damaged). This late language, however, has very similar structures to resultatives, called pseudoresultatives (among other names), yet presenting different syntactic and morphological characteristics compared to resultatives, i.e. ii) Maria empilhou as almofadas alto - ‘Maria piled the cushions high’ and (iii) João varreu o chão bem limpinho - João swept the floor very cleanDIMINUTIVE. Therefore the second goal of this work is to empirically demonstrate and support the claim that resultatives are of a different structural nature from these similar constructions.
Key-words:
resultative; pseudoresultative; secondary predication; result