Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

In the three examples in (2), contrasting temporal adverbials are used to differentiate the
lexical aspectual properties of the complex predicates “to hammer,” “to hammer out” and
“to hammer flat.” In (2a), the bare verb can only occur with the unbounded temporal
adverbial “for three hours,” whereas the bounded temporal adverbial is ungrammatical:
this indicates that the bare verb “to hammer” is atelic. In (2b), the introduction of a
particle in a particle-verb construction allows the complex verb “to hammer out” to
appear with either of the two temporal adverbials, indicating that there is an available
telic endpoint in the semantics of the verb, but that it need not have been reached. The
example in (2c), however, is inherently telic or better “resultative” and excludes the
unbounded temporal adverbial. Note therefore that, even in English, so-called lexical
aspect is in fact a grammatical phenomenon: particle-verbs as in (2b) show one type of
telicity, while resultative secondary predicates (see below for definition) as in (2c) show
another more restricted type of telicity.
There are in fact a number of different types of what has come to be called
secondary predication, some of which are illustrated in (3) below (the following
examples correspond to Rothstein 2004, 60, examples 2a, 2b, and 3).
(3) a. John i drove the car drunk i.
b. Mary drank the coffee i hot i.
c. John painted the house i red i.
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