Joana Portia Antwi-Danso

This dissertation captures the licensing factors that underlie the distribution of resultative constructions in English and German. The usage-based model put forward in this dissertation argues for a constructional approach towards resultatives that regards the multiple conventionalized senses associated with verbs as central to a framework that aims at capturing the full range of resultative constructions. Based on corpus data which show that particular senses of verbs subcategorize for distinct semantic and/or syntactic classes of resultative phrases and distinct semantic classes of postverbal NPs, I argue that resultatives should be grouped into two main classes, namely conventionalized resultative constructions and non-conventionalized resultative constructions. On this view, each particular sense of a verb constitutes a mini-construction represented by an event-frame that captures the semantic/pragmatic and syntactic specifications of the sense of the verb.