Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang

Particles as grammaticalized complex predicates 167
Manner-of-motion verbs in (iii) make good fits, too (in the non-causative pruned
version of the LCS). The denominal verbs in (iv) specify manner too, but do not
have an independent existence outside the particle verb combination, and they fit
the LCS less well for that reason (e.g., (21)):
(21) a. They elbowed me out
b. [CAUSE [ACT (They)], BECOME [out (me)]], by [elbowing(They)]
When the verb does not specify manner, but is a conversion of the state W itself
(the verbs in (v)) or a ‘light’ verb, as in (vi), they do not fit the LCS. The fact that
specifying manner is apparently important for a good fit is interesting, as the
manner-of-motion verbs in (iii) and the denominal verbs in (iv) are only robustly
attested from EModE onwards, as we will see in section 4.3.
The point to note is that the less than perfect fit of some of these particle
verbs also comes to the fore when these same verbs appear with genuine syntactic
predicates, and is due to the contribution of the verb rather than to that
of particle or predicate. What is different between particles and predicates is the
degree of explicitness of W. The particle appears to be bleached to a degree that
does not seem possible with genuine predicates. Adjectives, expressing properties,
are less likely to bleach; but paths, with or without endpoints, may do
so very easily. There is a clear link here with productivity: spatial resultatives
appear to be totally productive in that any spatial PP that can be construed as
a path can be used as a complex predicate (Goldberg & Jackendoff 2004: 558);
APs such as free (of NP), clear (of NP), apart, open and shut, i.e., exactly the set
of APs that may grammaticalize (see (3a)), are also fairly freely productive and
are argued to be interpreted as “spatial being open configurations with some
force-dynamic overtones” (Goldberg & Jackendoff 2004: 558). They do not only
represent a property but a spatial configuration “affording free passage between
the interior and exterior of the object” (Goldberg & Jackendoff 2004: 559). This
insight, then, allows us to postulate the generalization that only path-predicates
will grammaticalize.
.2 The defocused complement of Prt
Paths leave much more room for pragmatic interpretation than properties, and
part of the grammaticalization process is the fact that the complement of the preposition
becomes, in McIntyre’s (2004) words, ‘defocused’: in he took the ring off, the
object can be pragmatically reconstructed with ease given our knowledge of rings
and fingers; in other cases, the exact identification or reconstruction of the ground
is either unimportant or infelicitous (cf. also the examples in (6) above):
(22) a. She took a newspaper in (= into the house).
b. She threw the remains of the dinner out (= out of the house).