No abstract

This study attempts to propose a syntactic distinction between true resultatives and pseudo-resultatives and to provide an overview of the resultative constructions in European Portuguese (EP). It has been found that true resultatives, which have causative structures and involve Manner Conflation, are not allowed in EP, contrasting to languages such as English. That is because EP (or Romance languages in general) does not allow Manner Conflation. There are some resultative-like sentences in EP, but they should belong to the pseudo-resultative category, which contains an agentive structure and exhibits semantic and syntactic differences from true resultatives. In addition, simple resultatives, which have causative structures formed with light verbs (instead of Manner verbs) are also attested in EP because no Manner Conflation is involved.

Based on the caused eventuality, causation can be subdivided into causation of an activity and causation of change of state. By analyzing how causatives are expressed in European Portuguese and Mandarin Chinese, this study shows that these two languages exhibit quite a lot of differences in expressing causation of change of state. We have observed that quite many Portuguese verbs which intrinsically involve causative meanings do not have Chinese equivalence in simplex verb forms – their Chinese counterparts often take complex forms, including a construction we call “Causative Resultative V-Vs” (CR V-Vs). Difference is also found in the derivation direction: whereas anticausation plays a big role in Portuguese, causation is the main process in Chinese. We attribute the contrast to different expressing powers of verb roots in the two languages: while Portuguese verb roots are able to express complex meanings, Chinese roots mostly denote either a pure activity or a pure state/result.