Resultatives in Basque: A Diachronic Study

Abstract

This paper deals with several aspects of the diachrony of Basque resultative constructions. In present day Basque, resultatives can be used with perfect-like meaning. The goal of this paper has been thus to study the development of the non-resultative uses of resultative constructions. To this end, the diathesis types of resultative and the meanings the construction may convey are studied in a corpus of 17th to 20th century texts. It has been found that in the time span covered by the study, new diathesis types are introduced and two new meanings develop: perfect and experiential.

Basque adjectival participles: Stative, resultative or experiential

“…The fact that non-verbal participles can have an experiential interpretation was already observed in the diachronic study carried out by Krajewska (2012;2013a;b), a work that analyses Basque texts written from the 17 th to the 20 th century. According to her, the experiential interpretation is favored when the situation has held many times and, as a consequence, the subject is considered an experienced person due to what she/he has lived.…”

“…car-det.abs many.times break-ptcp-pred be(loc).3sgabs Intended: 'The car is broken many times.' According to Krajewska (2012;2013a;b), the resultative reading is highly predominant with change of state verbs, which historically are also the most frequent verbs in this configuration. Even if no change of frequency has been observed in the classes of verbs used during the last centuries, Krajewska notes that the experiential interpretation increases from the 16 th to the 20 th century; according to her, it starts to appear with a certain frequency in the late 19 th century.…”

“…The fact that -a ending participles can have a particular type of experiential interpretation might suggest that this configuration is really a perfect construction, involving a verbal participle and an auxiliary. Krajewska (2012;2013a;b) actually claims that this kind of participles are in the middle of a grammaticalization process towards a new perfect. She points out that, in the presence of cognitive, perception and communication predicates, as well as stative and atelic unergatives predicates, the experiential interpretation has become more common in the last centuries.…”

“…The fact that both possible interpretations -the resultant state reading and the experiential one -arise in a configuration involving the same aspectual head is also supported by the fact that they evolved diachronically at the same time. 28 According to Krajewska (2012;2013a;b), the rise in the frequency of experientials goes together with the rise of resultatives that allow temporal/spatial modification (called perfect in her works). At some point in the 19 th century, the stativizing aspectual head turned into an aspectual operator denoting anteriority.…”

Hybrid intransitives in Basque

“…Adjectival resultative participles denote a consequent state reached after a prior event (among many others, Kratzer 1994;2000;Anagnostopoulou 2003;Embick 2004;Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou 2008;Gehrke 2011) and are mainly compatible with telic verbs that involve an internal argument, in other words, transitive verbs and unaccusatives. Additionally, in Basque, the configuration illustrated in (39)-(41), with the adjectival participle ending in -a, can have, apart from the resultative meaning, an experiential one (Hualde et al 1994;Krajewska 2012;2013a;b). The experiential interpretation arises when the participle is built on verbs that do not yield a good result state, 18 such as unergatives, and when it is built on transitive verbs and the theme of predication is co-indexed with the external argument of the verb (rather than the internal one) (Berro 2019).…”