A door that swings noiselessly open may creak shut: internal motion and concurrent changes of state

Abstract

This article advances a lexical-constructional analysis of sentences like The door swung open and The trap door fell shut (henceforth open/shut expressions). These open/shut expressions involve both motion and change of state, as described by the verb and the AP, respectively.

Two important characteristics of open/shut expressions are: (1) that they involve internal motion, as distinct from translational motion (e.g., The ball bounced down the hall) or self-contained motion (e.g., The ball bounced up and down on the same floor tile) in the sense of Talmy (2000), and (2) that the change of state is concurrent with the internal motion.

Since open/shut expressions involve both motion and change of state, they are different from simple change-of-state expressions like He fell silent, which involve a change of state alone. They cannot be identified with spatial resultatives like Bill rolled out of the room, either, for the postverbal AP denotes a state.

Remarkably, open/shut expressions should also be discriminated from intransitive resultatives like The kettle boiled dry, in that the AP open or shut simply indicates that the state of being open or shut results, without specifying the entity that state is predicated of. This analysis allows us to account for why open/shut expressions behave differently from ordinary resultatives, which are to be accounted for by means of argument structure constructions, as Goldberg (1995) argues.

Open/shut expressions with verbs of sound emission (e.g., The door creaked open) can be similarly handled. What makes these open/shut expressions distinct from open/shut expressions like The door swung open is that, generally, the verb metonymically stands for the internal motion, rather than describing the manner/path of the internal motion.