''On the bridge between life and death''. Resultatives in English and German, with reference to ''Poison Verbs + to death'' combinations - a constructional/cognitive account

Exploiting again the field of Cognitive Linguistics, we could reach a more fine-grained analysis of the distribution of resultatives with the to death-phrase by relying upon the investigation brought about by Sandra Peña Cervel, who following the theories by Ruiz de Mendoza and Mayral concerning the metaphorical level of language, individuates other interesting distinctions among the verbs which are classified by Faber and Mairal (1999) as verb of existence (kill, gun, knife, poison, garrotte, bayonet, smother, torture, suffocate, strangle, crucify, hack, stab et al.).
Some of these verbal items can also be found inside the list of the so called killing verbs, a verbal class defined by Levin (1993: 230-31) and split into two subcategories, that is, murder verbs and poison verbs. The former ones indicate the simple action of killing, with little further specifications (kill is considered a super-ordinate). In this case a resultative outcome could sound quite redundant. Conversely, the latter ones relate to actions which are way of killing; thus they “lexicalize the means but not the result, so that they can occur with the prepositional phrase to death” (Peña 2010: 4) Yet Levin’s distinction is able to account for only a small slice of differences, without getting a closer outlook on the way these verbs lexicalize their action. If we had to apply this classification to the huge list of verbs above quoted, only kill would pertain to the class of killing verbs: also verb like murder, execute lexicalize something more specific, like the purpose of the action, but not the means/instrument. Thus we propose to define verbs such execute, murder, liquidate etc as intentional killing verbs.
The other ones lexicalizing the means or the instruments will widen the class of poison verbs but will also be more finely described by means of conceptual metonymy, a linguistic process which causes a shift (or mapping) “from a conceptually salient conceptual entity (…) to another conceptual entity” (Radden & Dirven 2007: 14) within the same semantic domain. [...]