A sweeping vindication
Before I head off to bed, a victory notice: sweep can take the instrument as a direct object. Some rather vocal group in my Computational Lexical Semantics class was rather dubious about my example (something like “he swept the broom vigorously back and forth” and “sweep the eraser across the chalkboard”).
The syntax/lexical semantics literature doesn’t back me up. The deadly * of ungrammaticality is placed before She/John swept the broom by Heidi Harley and Raffaella Folli in published work (Studia Linguistica) and in handouts, and also by Doris L. Payne, Leonard Ole-Kotikash and A. Keswe Mapena Ole-Lekutit (in the Journal of African Languages and Linguistics). The ungrammaticality is also remarked upon by Teun Hoekstra in a Lingua article: “Thus, although one can eat, sweep or mow something, there is no sense in which one can eat oneself, sweep a broom, mow a scythe, etc.”
Man, I am so in trouble…wait.
He moved backward, and she swept the broom furiously into the doorway after him. (link)
She swept the broom viciously along the weatherworn boards. (link)
Sweep the broom across the surface of the water. Explain that whales swim and feed all day on swarms of krill. (link)
Tips and tricks: Sweep the brush across the powder a few times, then tap off any excess. (link)
Sweep the sponge across the compact and, beginning at the centre of the forehead, blend out toward your hairline and then down along the sides of the face… (link)
It was peculiar, because the people had to bend down to sweep the broom across the floor. (link)
STEP 7: Sweep the broom in a circle together until the story is finished. (link)
Anyway, by the end of the discussion I’d managed to convince a few people that it was a legitimate valence, probably comparable to the valence of kick in which the object is the leg being kicked out.
The examples do indeed sound fine to me. But it is noteworthy that they all include a locative component: into the doorway, along the boards, across the surface, in a circle, etc. Actually, “in a circle” isn’t really locative, but I don’t think that’s quite the same “sweep”, in that there’s no sense of cleaning involved, and you could easily replace “broom” with “yardstick” or “cape” without affecting the sense (though you’d affect the ceremony rather drastically).
Heidi’s “John swept the broom” still sounds quite bad to me, as would, say, “The house needed cleaning, so I spent all morning sweeping the broom”.
It is true, and somewhat unfortunate, that many of the examples have either a source/path/goal complement. There are a few that don’t such as:
Mr. Goss needs to continue sweeping that broom until all the ‘dirt’ is gone, and the old ‘baggage’ removed.
I read and (try to) write as much as I sweep the broom.
But these are metaphorical, so one can always do the hand-waving act of “but metaphorical senses get to have different complementation patterns.” One will then have to hope that they achieved those patterns after acquiring the metaphorical sense.
In any case, one could do a sort of analysis where intransitive sweep (which must mean ’sweep in order to clean’ as opposed to the sense in he swept his hand forward; this latter sense must have an SPG argument) can take a small clause like the broom across the floor, similar to some analyses of resultatives. This would require a separate (null) morpheme or special lexical rule to get the semantic composition to work out. OR, you could say that some part of the semantics o\f sweep requires that, if the object is the instrument, then the location must be specified. There is a parallel, I think, in some creation verbs.
He made a statue (from / out of a block of marble)
He made a block of marble * (into a statue)