Effected Objects in English and Spanish

This paper examines resulting objects in English and Spanish. Fillmore's (1968) concept of effected object, e.g. He built the table has been extended to include certain resulting objects which are not sub categorized by their verbs: He kicked a hole in the door, She smiled her thanks or They pushed their way through the crowd. These constructions, we argue, are formed by fusing two semantic predicates into one: the object expresses a result while the verb designates the means by which the intended result is achieved. An analysis of corpus examples demonstrates that they are neither totally lexicalized nor regular productive patterns. The intermediate lexicalized position in question is due to a gradual metaphoric process found in this English construction, a process not allowed in Spanish. The paper concludes that the inability of Spanish to fuse two semantic predicates in this lexically unfilled resulting construction, which works independently of the particular lexical items that instantiate it, may be a consequence of the rigidity of its lexical items, which are strongly marked by morphology. The lack of inflectional information of most English words, on the contrary, confers more grammatical power to the construction.