The Syntactic Structure of Palauan Resultatives

Embick (2004) has recently challenged the widely held view that English resultative participles (or adjectival passives) are formed in the lexicon while (verbal) passives are built syntactically (a proposal originally formalized in Wasow 1977; see also Bresnan 1982, Levin and Rappaport 1986, and many others). Instead, Embick argues for a syntactic analysis to explain why only certain arguments of a verb may serve as externalized arguments of a corresponding resultative, which must be stipulated on lexical analyses. I enrich the debate by examining the structure of resultatives in Palauan, an Austronesian language with about 15,000 speakers in Micronesia. I provide empirical evidence for a particular syntactic and semantic analysis of Palauan resultatives that is compatible with Kratzer's (2000, 2005) semantic analysis of German resultatives and Embick's (2004) syntactic analysis of English resultatives.