LAUSR

Abstract The present paper investigates a subtype of (analytical) resultative constructions 1 , viz. Nomination Verb Constructions (e.g. Henry was proclaimed King of England), within a comparative Germanic – Romance perspective. Resultative constructions are a priori atypical of Romance languages, which belong to the so-called class of ‘verb-framing’ languages (cf. Talmy 1985, 1991) and hence are not expected to encode the result of an event outside the matrix verb. In light of this restriction, this paper offers a fine-grained corpus-based description of one particular—though crucial—aspect of nomination verb constructions, viz. the resultative secondary predicate, from a contrastive point of view. Although there is an extensive literature on resultative constructions, it is rarely mentioned that the resultative secondary predicate can be instantiated by a noun in these constructions, as is the case with nomination verbs. The study of four different languages (i.e. Dutch, English, French and Spanish) shows (i) that, although bare nouns are the default option in these constructions, a whole array of morpho-syntactic categories are attested, (ii) that the resultative secondary predicate may be unmarked or marked in several ways (e.g. via the predicative markers to and as), and (iii) that the classical Germanic – Romance dichotomy is questioned by the existence of nomination verb constructions since the resultative construction does appear in Romance languages with these verbs, and is, in fact, syntactically less complex than in Dutch, which always needs additional marking.