Resultative vs. causative event framing: Description, modelling, problems

This contribution looks into special properties of English causative verbs that show a wide spectrum of distribution patterns. These verbs extend their canonical complementation frames (as transitives) as these constructions show aberrant behaviour in transitivity and telicity. The study attempts to show the close link between causativity, telicity and resultativity in events lexicalised in English. From an observed defi ciency of telic verbs as a class and telicity in the Vendlerian sense itself as a verb classifi er, the paper argues for a primacy of resultativity and the need for a formal description and subsequent modelling of event structures via the resultative – non-resultative dichotomy, which for some is rather a cline than a dichotomy. Resultativity is empirically derived as an emerging property out of a proper analysis of the features of verbal events. For this end, events will be classifi ed according to their lexical-temporal profi le and according to the semantic parameters of their causative resultativity