High-Level Cognitive Operations and the Resultative Construction: A Case Study

Abstract

The resultative construction has sparked the interest of many researchers from different traditions, mainly from formal, functional, and constructional strands. Our proposal is much in line with cognitively-oriented constructionist approaches to language, especially the work by Goldberg (1995, 2006) and Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal (2008, 2011). This study is a qualitative and usage-based analysis of some specific instantiations of the resultative pattern in which the resultative element is the prepositional phrase to sleep. Three main objectives are pursued in this proposal: (i) the identification of the different groups of predicates (from among those put forward by Levin, 1993) that are felicitously incorporated into these particular examples of the resultative construction; (ii) the examination of the external constraints (mainly high-level metaphor) that license lexical-constructional fusion for each of the different sets of predicates; and (iii) the reasons why the expressions that are the object of study are pragmatically plausible.