Accounting for the variation in West Benue resultative constructions

Abstract

This paper investigates the variation of resultative serial verb constructions in Benue-Kwa languages. The main claim is that the variation can be explained assuming three versions of general lexicon rules which turn main verbs into complex predicates selecting for a second verb and attracting its arguments. Each language has a language specific version of these lexicon rules, enriched with language specific peculiarities to account for the specific behaviour of verbal inflection. The fact that not all of the lexicon rules do operate in each languages is another source of variation.