Kurt Tippett kicked two goals last night. (Aussie ABC News)
It seems that this sentence is ‘one-complement pattern with monotransitive verb (Angela Downing’s term). Can we call ‘two goals’ the resultative complement?
Answer
Based on an hour or so of reading, everything I’ve seen about resultative complement has to do with Chinese. The resultative complements are words that are attached to activity verbs to indicate completion or both completion and comprehension.
The first point is that resultative complements are tacked onto “activity” verbs (run, swim, read, write, etc.) all of which can be intransitive. Kick is generally transitive and implies an event rather than an activity: one kicks something such as goals.
The second point is that resultative complements appear to solve the problem of showing whether an activity is complete or not. In Chinese, “I read a book” (past tense of read) does not mean that I finished reading as it does in English. To do that, I have to attach the resultative complement “kan”: “I read-kan a book”, if I may. That would mean I read and finished a book. (Similarly, attaching “dong” instead of “kan” would mean that I read, finished and understood a book.)
Given this information, I find a distinction between a direct object and a resultative complement in grammar, whether the direct object is a “one-complement of a monotransitive verb” or not.
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : Listenever , Answer Author : BobRodes
