Pernilla Hallonsten Halling

Depictives and resultatives

Depictives are constructions where a state or property is predicated of a participant, in addition to the main predicate. As illustrated extensively in the volume edited by Himmelmann & Schultze-Berndt (2005a), depictives are akin to adverbs, in their function generally, and commonly also in their encoding in different languages. English separates the encoding of depictives and manner adverbs, whereas German does not, as illustrated in (2.16-2.17) from Himmelmann & Schultze-Berndt (2005b: 2).

(2.16) (a) Claire left the room angry.
(b) Claire left the room angrily.
(2.17) Claire hat wütend das Zimmer verlassen.
depictive manner
depictive/manner

It is not only in the formal encoding that English and German differ. According to Him- melmann & Schultze-Berndt (2005b), the meaning of (2.17) is vague for native speakers of German. This encoding overlap of adverbs and depictives is quite common cross- linguistically, and has been treated not only by Schultze-Berndt & Himmelmann (2004) and Himmelmann & Schultze-Berndt (2005b), but also by Verkerk (2009), who compares their encoding to that of resultatives. Verkerk (2009: 123) takes the example of Hungar- ian, where the same adverbial marking -en (or an allomorph) is used for both adverbs and depictives.

(2.18) Hungarian (Uralic) (de Groot 2008: 4, Marácz 1989: 226)

1. 
   Péter
   

Peter
mérges-en
angry-adv
ment
went
el.
away
manner

‘Peter left angrily.’

2. 
   János
   

John
üres-en
empty-adv
hozta be
brought.3sg in
a
the
vázát.
vase.acc
depictive

‘John brought in the vase empty.’

Resultatives are constructions where a state is predicated as a result of the event that the main predicate encodes. Many accounts dealing with depictives also discuss resultatives, to some extent as belonging to the same domain. Example (2.19) shows an instance of an English resultative, in which the carrots are soft as a result of George having boiled them (Himmelmann & Schultze-Berndt 2005b: 4).

(2.19) George boiled the carrots soft. resultative

Verkerk (2009) finds the overlaps of adverbs and resultatives to be just as common in her language sample as those of adverbs and depictives. Hebrew is taken as an example where an adjective with the prepostional prefix be- ‘with’/‘in’⁸ is used in both manner adverbs and resultatives (2009: 123).

(2.20) Modern Hebrew (Afro-Asiatic) (Glinert 1994: 227, Son 2007: 139)

1. 
   Hu
   

3sg
po’el
work.prs