From the VVINGPP construction to the VVING pattern. A descriptive account

In the first part of this paper, we assess Goldberg's (2006, pp. 50-52) account of the English syntactic pattern she labels "VVingPP construction" (e.g. The toddler went screaming down the street), which is based on five constraints concerning argumenthood, verb types, transitivity, extended meaning, and constituency. On the basis of an analysis of data collected from dictionaries, corpora, and literary works, we argue that Goldberg's account needs to be refined. A much more complex picture emerges from our analysis than is assumed by Goldberg, whose constraints are often violated. Drawing on these observations, in the second part of the paper, we propose, in the case at hand, replacing Goldberg's notion of 'construction' with that of pattern, intended as a cluster of occurrences whose common (formal and semantic) traits must be captured at a more abstract level. Moreover, we observe that the instantiations of the pattern are related via family resemblance not only with each other but also with occurrences which do not feature a PP. This suggests that a more general VVing pattern can be posited, which portrays the integration of two events. At the same time, the data also suggest that low-level generalisations of limited scope can still be drawn over clusters of occurrences characterized by the interaction between V, Ving, and (possibly) PP. By focusing on both the former and the latter generalisations, it is possible to notice that the event integration can be described in terms of causality and/or temporal coextension.