Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

exemplify. Rather than speaking in generalities, I would like to introduce an example
from English which may serve as an informal model of the phenomenon I have in mind.
English is capable, for example, of converting a predicate of uncertain telicity into a
resultative through the introduction of an adjective as a secondary predicate that modifies
the direct object and describes the resultant state in some fashion (“he swept the floor” >
“he swept the floor clean”). A derived achievement such as “he swept the floor clean”
can then be transformed into an accomplishment through the formation of a light verb
construction: in one kind of English light verb construction, the main verb is changed into
an indefinite noun that is modified by an attributive adjective that corresponds to the
adjective used to form the resultative secondary predicate; the indefinite noun derived
from the underlying main verb becomes the direct object of a higher, ditransitive verb
which is introduced as the new main verb, while the original or underlying direct object
becomes either the recipient or the source in a low applicative construction (“he swept the
floor clean” > “he gave the floor a clean sweep”). Note that in the following parallel the
lexical meaning of the English and Sumerian forms is completely unrelated (clean ≠ ˙ul,
˙ul = “bad, rotten, false”)—they are only parallel in morphosyntactic form, if that, see
below for further discussion.
(67) a. The floor is clean ˙ul
b. He swept the floor clean ßu bi 2.˙ul
c. He gave the floor a clean sweep ßu ˙ul bi 2.du 11
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