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

--- Christopher Bates <chris.maths_student@...> wrote:


<snip>
>
> (1) The man ate some meat raw
> (2) The man ate some raw meat
>
As a non-academically trained amateur I always approach these kinds of problem
intuitively. My own conlang Soaloa would translate these two quite differently.
In sentence two the word "raw" is being used as a specifier to distinguish one
piece of meat from another. It might be used to answer the question "which meat
did the man eat." However, sentence two might also be used to answer the
question "How much raw meat did the man eat?" But that seems the less likely
implied question and places the emphasis in the answer on "some" rather than on
"raw".

Sentence two, however, rather than specifying which meat in particular was
eaten, (or how much of the specified meat was eaten) specifies the manner in
which it was eaten, and so modifies the verb, not the noun. It answers the
question "How was the meat eaten."

So the difference lies in the questions each sentence answers:

1. How did the man eat some meat?
2. Which meat did the man eat?
  (Or, if we emphasize "some", how much raw meat did the man eat?)

--gary