Re: Question for English Speakers about Secondary Predicates (also posted on ZBB)

On Thu, 28 Dec 2006 12:50:15 +0000, Christopher Bates
<chris.maths_student@...> wrote:

>I want to see if people agree with my own intuition about the behavoir
>secondary predicates in English with indefinite controllers. Basically,
>consider a sentence with a secondary predicate. The typical example is
>something like:
>
>The man ate the meat raw
>
>Now, "raw" is making an assertion about one of the arguments of the main
>verb, namely "the meat". It asserts that at the time of eating, the meat
>was raw. But almost all the examples linguists tend to use of secondary
>predicates have definite controllers. I want people's judgement about
>the following sentences:
>
>(1) The man ate some meat raw
>(2) The man ate some raw meat
>
>Firstly, are both grammatical? If they are, is there a difference in
>meaning for you? If there isn't, do you prefer to use one over the
>other?
As a native speaker I would answer as such:
The secondary predicate applies an adjective outside the
scope of the determiner. For example:

(1) The man ate the raw meat.
(2) The man ate the meat raw.

In (1) "raw" as an adjective is being used to help distinguish
a specific meat out of the domain of all possible meats.
In (2) "raw" as a secondary predicate is giving additional
new information about "the meat" which has already been defined
before its status of "raw" has been considered.

In your second set of sentences:

(1) The man ate some meat raw
(2) The man ate some raw meat

Since these are indefinite, using the adjective outside of the
scope of the determiner does not change the meaning of the sentence,
so these sentences are the same. The first one is still grammatical
as English allows the use of secondary predicates.

BTW in Ankanian the attributive is used to show the secondary predicate,
so the above definite sentences would be:

(1) Soku akana aburse yers.
(2) Soku akana aburse yerse. (lit. Ate the man the meat a raw one)

Harold