A Particle Theory of Light Verbs Gillian Ramchand (joint work with Peter Svenonius) The empirical heart of this

paper is a comparison of resultative light verb constructions (known from such languages as Hindi/Urdu (Butt 1995, Butt & Ramchand 2001) and illustrated here in Bengali (as shown in example (1)), with resultative verb-particle constructions in Germanic (cf. the English examples in (2)). (1) (a)ami amta kh eye ph ellam . I-nom mango-class. eaten-nonfinite throw-past/1st I ate up the mango. (b)ami pathorta th ele ph ellam . I-nom stone-class. pushed-nonfinite throw-past/1st I pushed (punctual) the stone/I gave the stone a push. (2) (a) I ate up the mango/I ate the mango up. (b) I pushed over the chair./I pushed the chair over. Despite their supercial dierences, we demonstrate that these two constructions share the following striking similarities: (i) they represent event structures composed of the same abstract semantic components with the same syntactic constituency; (ii) they both involve what can be described as object sharing; (iii) they give rise to a single (monoclausal) predicational domain from the point of view of external syntax. Specically, we will propose an analysis that involves a rst phase (or lexical) syntax constructed from projections which correspond to particular subeventual primitives. We assume a decomposition that consists maximally of vP(the causing projection), VP (a process projection) and RP (a result projection), thus extending the intuitions behind recent work by Ritter and Rosen 1998, Borer 1998, Ramchand 2001. Concentrating on the V and R heads, we assume interpretational rules which combine the eventualities introduced by the respective heads into a single complex event, corresponding to a Process followed by a State to create a derived accomplishment structure (cf. Pustejovsky 1991, Grimshaw 1991, Higginbotham 1999, van Hout 1998). Our view of this rst phase syntax is constrained by the assumption that only certain kinds of event composition are possible, and conversely that the particular functional heads assumed here always correspond to particular kinds of event composition. Thus, it is not an accident that verb template augmentation (in the sense of Levin and Rappaport 1998) involves the primitives of causation and telos augmentation with great generality crosslinguistically. This view of rst phase syntax accounts for the predicational unity of the complex predicate as well as their resultative semantics ((i) and (ii) above). Thus, aspectual light verb constructions manifest the same components of rst phase syntax (v-V-R) as verb-particle constructions, but with dierent parts lexicalized: in the particle constructions, the higher part (V) has richer lexical content than the lower part (R); in the light verb constructions, the lower parts (R) have richer lexical content than the semantically bleached verb higher up.