Nora spent the afternoon knitting. Rather, in the account of section 6.6, these bits of meaning come from
constructionalVP idioms. Thehearercantellthata constructionalidiomisbeingused becausethesimplecomposition
of the verb with its complements is ill-formed: there are too many arguments or they are of the wrong type. In (22c)
the particleawayalso serves as an overt cue.
In each case, the complements are treated not as semantic arguments of the verb but as semantic arguments of the
constructional meaning. Chapter 6 left this unformalized; we can now work it out more precisely. (23) illustrates the
resultativeconstruction; theothers have similar structures. Inparticular, theverb(subscripted2 here) corresponds toa
function deep inside a modifying Event, whereas in simple composition it would correspond to the main function.^206
More speculatively, it seems possible to regard various discourse phenomena also as instances of enriched
composition. Take, for example, the possibility of answering awh-question with an isolated phrase.
PHRASAL SEMANTICS 393
(^206) Some details of (23):•
I a mfollowing the standard paraphrase of resultatives:Kim cooked the pot black=‘Ki mcaused the pot to beco me (INCH BE) black by cooking (in it).’This should be
self-explanatory in (23) except for thefinal means phrase‘by cooking (in it).’
- The means phrase is a modifier of the main Event. It is a lambda extraction over an Event expressible as‘Kim's cooking causedthis.’(Alternatively,HELPor
FACILITATEmight be more appropriate than CAUSE.) That is, on this analysis a means phrase is semantically parallel to the relative clauses discussed in section
12.1.3. - TheupperCAUSEin (23)has an Agent argumentthatis open but lacksa subscript. It doesnotneed onebecause thegenerallinking rules ofsimplecompositionwill
map it into subject position, as is standard for Agents. (23) uses the two-argument version ofCAUSE; probably the three-argument version is more appropriate. - (23) leaves blank the argument structure of F 2 , which corresponds to the syntacticverb, e.g.cookinKim cooked the pot black.Arefinement is necessary to show how
we know that Ki mdid the cooking.