Resultative secondary predicates in cooking recipes: an empirical study of Germanic and Romance languages

Abstract The present article provides a contrastive corpus-based analysis of resultative secondary predicates in recipe contexts. Two Germanic languages (Dutch and English) and two Romance languages (French and Spanish) are investigated. Based on a sample of 4,000 (i.e., 1,000 per language) resultative constructions (RCs) retrieved from a tailor-made corpus of cooking recipes, this study sheds new light on Talmy’s typological dichotomy between satellite-framed and verb-framed languages. Specifically, it is shown that (i) Adjectival phrases (APs) are not totally excluded from Romance RCs but their occurrence is restricted in several ways. (ii) Prepositional phrases (PPs) can be headed by a whole range of prepositions (or ‘result markers’) which exhibit important differences in terms of semantic properties, token frequency, and distribution across verb classes: ‘weak’ result markers, which mainly consist of locative prepositions (viz. in ‘in’ in Dutch, in in English and en ‘in’ and a ‘to’ in Spanish) occur almost exclusively in RCs that contain achievements, which are argued to be less dynamic, depictive-like instances of the construction. By contrast, ‘strong’ result markers (e.g., tot ‘to/until’ in Dutch, to , into , and until in English, en ‘in’ in French and a punto de ‘to point of’ in Spanish) combine with various aspectual classes, including activities, and may therefore give rise to ‘strong’ (i.e., aspect-shifting) RCs. Finally, (iii) although they are both ‘satellite-framed’ languages, Dutch and English impose different restrictions on the formal encoding of APs, which are very often preceded by the preposition until in English as a result of discourse and internal language factors.