Larry’s Reviews > Verb Meaning and the Lexicon: A First Phase Syntax > Status Update

The data on particles vs As indicate that “the complex form acts like a single unit with respect to aktionsart and argument structure, but is not a single lexical word”.

Some relevant difference between particles and result adverbs or adjectives: you can throw out the dog (to throw the dog out) but you can’t *paint red the barn (to paint the barn red). When a lexical item can’t “identify” Res°, that means that it can’t be far from Res°. Hence it seems that particles, unlike As, can identify Res°. Something like that

The solution? You get a direct resultative wwhen the subevents are identified by the same lexical item. For instance, “freeze” identifies solidity. You get an indirect one when the result is lexically foreign to the verb. For instance, “hoarse” is alien to “sing”.

It’s not that unaccusatives alone enter into resultative constructions: it’s that unaccusatives give rise to direct resultatives, where the process and the result are contemporaneous (“the lake froze solid”), while unergatives give rise to indirect resultatives, where not (“John sang himself hoarse”). What about “John bled Bill dry”? 4 this +other reasons, this dichotomy need revision (Ramchand)