Two ways of being a resultant state

Abstract

This work addresses two strategies that Spanish and other languages employ to codify the notion of ‘resultant state’: through a stative projection within the syntactic structure of the verb (internal resultant states: v.g. John disappeared for two years) and by means of the resultative construction with estar + past participle (derived resultant state; v.g. John was disappeared for two years). The contrast between both options is analyzed with respect to the position that the event argument which licenses the result reading occupies in the syntactic derivation, taking as a starting point a fine-grained model of the verbal phrase (or ‘first phase’) inspired by Ramchand (2008). In internal resultant states, the event dominates a stative projection; whereas in derived resultant states, the event is dominated by a stativizer external projection. Empirical consequences of this pattern are introduced for different domains: the interpretation of certain modifiers, the availability of present-oriented epistemic readings and the inclusion relation between Event Time and Reference Time.