It is well-known that intransitive verbs appear in two different syntactic patterns in the English resultative construction: the NP XP pattern (e.g., Sandy danced herself stiff) and the bare XP pattern (e.g., The lake froze solid). The presence of an apparently semantically superfluous "fake" reflexive object in the NP XP pattern has suggested that a syntactic analysis is most appropriate. However, a study of naturally-occurring resultatives reveals a pattern of obligatoriness/optionality in the distribution of "fake" reflexives which calls a syntactic account into question. We argue that the key to the distribution of the "fake" reflexive, and more generally to the existence of the two resultative patterns, lies in the event structure, and not the syntactic structure, of resultatives. An event structure approach is suggested by recent work which ties the obligatoriness of some arguments to the internal structure of the event being described, with complex events being realized by verbs taking obligatory objects.

We propose that the two resultative patterns have distinct event structures. We show that the patterns differ with respect to the temporal relation between the event denoted by the verb and the event of achieving the result state introduced by the result XP. We argue that the temporal relation between the events in the NP XP pattern also characterizes lexical causatives, supporting the assignment of a complex event structure to such resultatives; however, we demonstrate that a causative analysis of the bare XP pattern is not justified, assigning it a simple event structure in which the two events are "coidentified". Given these event structures, the distinct syntax of the two patterns - including the presence of a "fake" reflexive - follows from principles governing the mapping from event structure to syntax presented in Rappaport Hovav and Levin 1998. Thus, this investigation provides new insight into both the resultative construction and the linguistic representation of events.

(This talk presents work carried out jointly with Malka Rappaport Hovav, Bar Ilan University)