Strong and weak resultatives with result roots in English and Spanish

Abstract

We consider a subclass of result verbs in Rappaport Hovav & Levin’s (2010) sense built on roots that entail change (Beavers & Koontz-Garboden, 2020), e.g., break, melt, explode, and tear. We argue that this class of roots possesses different grammatical properties between English and Spanish with respect to resultative constructions: these roots productively appear in both strong and weak resultatives in English but form only weak resultatives in Spanish (Washio, 1997). We propose an account of this asymmetry between the two languages rooted in differences in the semantic properties of the root class and independent differences in the inventory of prepositional heads available in each language: English possesses eventive change of state roots and eventive prepositions that express change of location/state, while their Spanish equivalents are stative, with the roots entailing change of state. This suggests that translational equivalents of roots across languages may differ in their grammatical properties and, therefore, possess different distributions in other constructions despite contributing the same conceptual content.