A new resultative construction in Spanish? A reply to Rodríguez Arrizabalaga

Abstract

AbstractWe respond to Rodríguez Arrizabalaga’s recent claim that Spanish shows genuine cases of strong resultative constructions, e.g.Juan apuñaló a Tomás hasta la muerte‘John stabbed Tom to death’, argued to be equivalent to the English construction with the PPto death. This claim is theoretically relevant as it challenges the verb-framed behavior of Spanish with respect to Talmy’s typology. Adopting a constructivist view of argument structure, we argue that Spanishhasta la muerteand Englishto deathconstructions of this type involve two completely distinct syntactic configurations, and that only the Englishto deathPP can be regarded as a resultative phrase. We claim that the SpanishhastaPP is syntactically computed as an adjunct external to the argument structure of the predicate and provides a boundary to the predicate it merges with. We thus show that the Spanish construction withhasta la muertefully conforms to the class of Talmy’s verb-framed languages in that this type of construction is expected to be fully available and productive in this class of languages.