Wipe the table clean – German speakers construe telicity differently in adjectival resultatives and transitives

Abstract

Change of state expressions involving weak-endstate verbs such as wipe and drink exhibit variation in telicity. The present study is the first to experimentally investigate change of state expressions referred to as adjectival control resultatives (e.g., wipe the table clean) and the corresponding simple transitives (e.g., wipe the table) regarding their telicity readings. Based on their semantic properties, we ask whether German speakers interpret adjectival resultatives as telic and simple transitives as fluctuating between telic and atelic. Following an event-structural approach to telicity, we also seek to contribute to the issue of which event-semantic properties adjectival resultatives and simple transitives share: if it is the adjective that evokes a telic interpretation, then the possible telic interpretation of simple transitives must arise by different means, suggesting a non-uniform construal of telicity. Twenty-one adults participated in a Truth-Value Judgment Task that varied Structure (resultative/transitive) and Event type (complete/incomplete). Generalized mixed effects logistic regression revealed a significant interaction between Event type and Structure. For complete events, acceptance was at ceiling for both structures. For incomplete events, acceptance was significantly lower for resultatives than for simple transitives. These results indicate that in adjectival resultatives telicity is construed semantically – via entailment – and in the corresponding simple transitives via a pragmatic inference, which is not computed very often. We propose that this type of simple transitives designates process events, exactly like their intransitive variant. Resultatives designate a transition event: the adjective and the main verb form a complex predicate; adjectives with closed scales like clean encode the prominent endstate subevent and the verb encodes the process subevent.