A Structural Analysis of Atelic Resultatives

　　　This paper discusses the syntactic structure of the apparent counterexamples to the telicity of resultatives with a bounded Theme DP, such as paint the wall red for an hour. Against Borer’s (2005) complex predicate approach, I argue that such resultatives are derived by merging the Asp [-telic] head directly with the a P denoting the lower event. Importantly, preserving the causal relation between the upper and lower events not only yields the partial resultative reading compositionally but also accounts for the word order. This framework, based on the notion of the timing of Merge (Hale and Keyser 2002), provides a unified account of atelic instances including locative alternation and V-AP-DP resultatives.