Two types of change-of-state attributes in English

Abstract

Contrary to the common belief that all attributes denoting a change of state belong to one and the same uniform class, we strongly defend in the present paper the existence of two distinct syntactic-semantic kinds of change of state attributes in the English language: on the one hand, those that complement the aspectual variants of the semantically vacuous copula be; and, on the other hand, those that combine with lexically autonomous verbs and are, therefore, optional for the grammaticality of the construction. Due to the markedly different behaviour they exhibit, we are going to distinguish both classes of attributes from a terminological point of view: we will call the members of the former group 'change of state attributes', strictly speaking, and those of the latter type, resultative attributes. To prove our hypothesis, we are going to base our study mainly on the nature of the verbal constituent that surfaces in the attributive structure and, as a consequence, on the syntactic and semantic relation it maintains with the attribute under discussion.