Reflections on Manner/Result Complementarity Malka Rappaport Hovav The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Beth Levin Stanford University June 2008 Nonstative verbs from various lexical fields are often classified as either manner or result verbs—a distinction implicated in language acquisition (Behrend 1990, Gentner 1978, Gropen et al. 1991), as well as in argument realization. Intuitively speaking, manner verbs specify as part of their meaning a manner of carrying out an action, while result verbs specify the coming about of a result state. Verbs of each type are listed in (1). As the lists illustrate, the manner/result distinction crosscuts the transitive/intransitive distinction. (1) a. MANNER VERBS: nibble, rub, scribble, sweep, flutter, laugh, run, swim, . . . b. RESULT VERBS: clean, cover, empty, fill, freeze, kill, melt, open, arrive, die, enter, faint, . . . The distinction is grammatically relevant, as manner and result verbs differ in the patterns of argument realization they display (Fillmore 1970, Rappaport Hovav and Levin 1998, 2005, despite questions raised by Goldberg 2001 and Mittwoch 2005). For example, while manner verbs are found with unspecified and nonsubcategorized objects in nonmodal, nonhabitual sentences, result verbs are not. (2) a. Kim scrubbed all morning. b. Kim scrubbed her fingers raw. (3) a. *The toddler broke. b. *The toddler broke his hands bloody. A further indication of the grammatical relevance of this distinction comes from an observation made in Levin and Rappaport Hovav (1991, 1995) that manner and result are often in complementary distribution: that is, a given verb tends to be classified as a manner verb or as a result verb, but not both. This generalization presupposes a distinction between what a verb LEXICALIZES—i.e. what it lexically 1