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

on 12/28/06 2:50 PM, Christopher Bates at chris.maths_student@NTLWORLD.COM
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? Here are my answers:
>
> (2) is clearly grammatical. (1) is possible but sounds awkward... I
> cannot percieve any meaning difference between the two. I prefer to use
> (2) over (1).
>
> This is a very important question for me because I'm making a slightly
> barmy engineered language, Díwà, where predication is really a more
> important notion than the distinction between nouns and verbs, which
> doesn't really exist. Now, Díwà has a construction very similar to
> English secondary predicates that allows you to make assertions about
> the arguments of some other verb. However, this construction is also
> extremely commonly used with indefinite arguments, for the following
> reason. Consider a sentence like:
>
> I saw a man
>
> In such sentences with indefinite NPs, the NP does not serve the typical
> nominal function of identifying a referent, but rather forms a covert
> part of the predication. Its structure is really something more like:
>
> see(I,X) and man(X)
> = I saw something, and that something was a man
>
> In Díwà, predication is the dominant notion, so Díwà marks this
> distinction between NPs that serve the purpose of identification vs
> those that are really predicative by making predicative NPs into
> secondary predicates, pretty much. This means, though, that Díwà does
> not distinguish (1) and (2), since both the fact that it was meat that
> the man ate and the fact that it was raw form part of the predication.
> This is all based on my own thinking, and if I've come to the wrong
> conclusions regarding indefinite NPs then Díwà is doing something even
> more insane than it was before... if, however, I'm right, then I predict
> that natlangs like English will either disprefer secondary predicates
> with indefinite controllers, or have no significant meaning difference
> between sentences like (1) and (2).
If I understand you correctly here, my sentiments basically agree with
yours.

The word "some" gets in the way for me here because I keep wanting to make
sentence (2) okay by interpreting it as a contrastive quantifier, like this:
"the man ate SOME meat raw (... but the REST he cooked first)." So allow me
to restate things with a count noun and the word "a", and I'll add my
perception of what the articles and word order imply:

(A) The man ate the raw onion. - listener is already aware of onion, and its
raw status
(B) The man ate the onion raw. - listener aware of onion, but not raw
status.

(C) The man ate a raw onion. - listener aware of neither onion nor raw
status
(D) The man ate an onion raw. - listener aware of neither onion nor raw
status (same as (C))

Sentence (D), said with a neutral intonation, does sound awkward to me, and
I think this is why: From (A) to (B), there a change in syntax that marks a
different implication (that the listener in (B) was not previously aware of
the raw status); but from (C) to (D) the same change in syntax doesn't tell
us anthing new (the listener could not have been aware of the raw status in
either case, because he didn¹t even know about the onion to begin with!), so
what's the point in changing the syntax? It seems redundant and thus perhaps
not *ungrammatical*, but strange - an unjustified complication.

(D) can be made acceptable if you intone it the right way, something like
this: "The man at an onion -- raw!!" Here it's being stressed that the raw
status is not merely unknown in the same way that the onion is unknown, but
that you wouldn't ever have expected it. So, the word order here does
actually signify something (or at least complement the intonation, which
does the real signifying - note that you can make the the same point with
intonation even with the normal syntax).

--
Josh Roth

http://fuscian.freespaces.com/

"Farewell, farewell to my beloved language,
Once English, now a vile orangutanguage."
-Ogden Nash