Discussion Note: Phrasal or Lexical Constructions?

Since the 1990s, more and more linguistic articles have been published in the framework of Construction Grammar. Although Kay and Fillmore (1999, p. 19) make it clear that Constructions are not necessarily phrasal, most of the authors suggest phrasal Constructions. This is especially apparent in Construction Grammar-inspired studies in the HPSG framework. In what follows, I show that the difference between phrasal approaches and lexical approaches is not as great as is sometimes claimed, although selecting one approach over the other may nevertheless have serious consequences. This discussion focuses on resultative constructions, a phenomenon for which both phrasal and lexical analyses have been suggested. I show that a considerable number of different Constructions must be postulated to account for all the patterns that may arise from the interaction of the resultative construction with both constituent reordering and valence changing processes. It is shown that adjuncts, predicate complexes, and derivational morphology pose considerable problems for the phrasal approach, while they are unproblematic for lexical rule-based approaches. The discussion is relevant for all frameworks that do not use transformations to map phrasal configurations to other phrasal configurations.∗ ∗I thank Brian D. Joseph, the editor of Language, his Associate Editor James McCloskey, and an anonymous reviewer of Language for detailed comments on an earlier version of this paper. I thank Ann Copestake, Kerstin Fischer, Paul Kay, Laura Michaelis, Detmar Meurers, Frank Richter, Ivan Sag, Anatol Stefanowitsch, and Arne Zeschel for discussion. I thank John Bateman, Dorothee Beermann, Gisbert Fanselow, Hans-Ulrich Krieger, Andrew McIntyre, and Shravan Vasishth for discussion and for comments on earlier versions of this paper. I gave presentations about phrasal and lexical analyses of the resultative construction at the Institute for General and Applied Linguistics at the University of Bremen, at the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabruck, at the Deutsches Seminar of the University of Tubingen, at the Linguistics Institute of the Ruhr University Bochum, at the workshop Foundations of Natural-Language Grammar at the ESSLLI 2005 in Edinburgh, and at HPSG 2005 in Lisbon. I thank the respective departments for the invitation, the reviewers of the conference and the workshop for comments, and the audiences for comments and discussion. The resultative construction was also one of the topics that were discussed during the PhD school Languages and Theories in Contrast in Bergen in 2005. I enjoyed the discussion very much and want to thank the organizers Helge Dyvik and Torbjorn Nordgard, my coteachers Miriam Butt, Helge Dyvik, and Peter Svenonius and the audience again.