He drenched beer into his jacket

You can’t say that – yeah? The correct version would be
‘He drenched his jacket with beer’

This post is to understand something in ‘The Stuff of Thought’ by Steve Pinker.

Some things you can say 2 ways eg
He splashed paint onto the wall
He splashed the wall with paint.

or
He rubbed oil into the wood
He rubbed the wood with oil.

But other verbs only work one way (the * is the ‘wrong’ form):
He nailed posters onto the board
*He nailed the board with posters.

He covered the bed with an afghan
*He covered an afghan onto the bed

He poured water into the glass
*He poured the glass with water.

Why do some verbs work both ways, while others only work one way (and of those, some work with the ‘with’ version, and some don’t).

One option is that this is just how it is, and to learn English you have to learn them one at a time. But Pinker’s answer (original paper by Beth Levin – reference at the end) is that the correct syntax depends on the meaning of the verb, at a deep level.

All the sentences contain a term for the role of ‘content’, which is some stuff, and a ‘container’, which is a place or holder or locator. So for example in
He drenched his jacket with beer
the jacket is the container, and beer is the content, the stuff which goes ‘into’ the container.

All the sentences have a direct object, which is ‘the thing affected’. In
He drenched his jacket with beer
the direct object is the jacket (‘he’ is the subject, and ‘beer’ is the oblique object).

The point – the correct syntactic form is determined by whether the verb is ‘about’ the content or the container.

The verbs to drench and to cover are ‘about’ the container, so sentences with them have to have the container as the direct object. So you cannot say
He drenched beer onto his jacket, nor
He covered a cloth onto the table

The verbs nail, pour and coil are about the content, so they cannot have the container as the direct object – that is, not
He poured the glass with water, nor
He coiled the pole with rope ( but ‘He coiled rope around the pole’ is OK)

Some verbs are ‘about’ both container and content, so you can say either eg
He loaded hay onto the wagon, and
He loaded the wagon with hay.

All these have the same syntactic form:
subject – verb – direct object – preposition – oblique object
but if you fill those slots arbitrarily, you get things like
He drenched beer into his jacket
which are wrong, in the sense that a native speaker would not normally say them, and the reason they would not is the deep meaning of the verb.

Original paper:

Levin, B. 1985 Lexical semantics in review: An Introduction (Lexicon Project Working Paper #1) Cambridhge Mass: MIT Center for Cognitive Science