Resultative

A resultative is a phrase that indicates the state of a noun resulting from the completion of the verb. In the English examples below, the affected noun is shown in bold and the resulting predicate is in "italics":

*John licked his plate "clean".
*Mary painted the fence "blue".
*The cold weather froze the lake "solid".

Subjects of passive and unaccusative verbs may participate in resulative constructions:

*Passive: The well was drained "dry".
*Unaccusative: The door swung "open".

Subjects of unergative verbs may also participate in resultative constructions, but a "dummy object", that is, an otherwise absent reflexive pronoun must be inserted:

*Gordon laughed himself "helpless".
*The child screamed itself "hoarse".

Resultatives are distinct from depictive constructions, though often both a resultative and a depictive reading is possible from the same sentence. For example, in "John fried the fish dry", a resultative reading suggests that as a result of John's frying, the fish became dry. On the other hand, also possible is a depictive reading in which John is already dry, and that is the state in which he is frying the fish (because e.g. he had been back from the beach for long enough to be dry). Both depictives and resultatives are important in the understanding of small clauses because their exact properties seem to vary considerably from language to language.