Re: Grammar-holes: secondary predication

On Tue, 5 Jun 2007 13:17:19 +0200, taliesin the storyteller <taliesin-
conlang@...> wrote:

>Secondary predication is a phenomenon related to two of the
>suggestions given in the thread "Difficult clauses":
>
>"We spent all night talking about I can't remember what."
>"She bought I lost count how many kinds of cheese."
>
>Here's some examples:
>
>"They eat fish raw" = they eat fish, the fish being raw as they eat it
>"They eat fish naked" = they eat fish, they are naked while doing so
>
>The above are depictive secondary predications, the first on the
>object and the second on the subject. It might be possible to
>interpret them the other way around of course but in this
>example the semantics trump the syntax.
>
>There's a third type of secondary predication, the resultative:
>
>"Jane cooked the chicken hot" can mean:
>
>"Jane was hot while cooking the chicken" (depictive, subject)
>"The chicken was hot while Jane cooked it" (depictive, object)
>"The chicken became hot as a result of Jane cooking it" (resultative)
>
>English can use other things than adjectives as the second
>predicate though:
>
>"Jane cooked the chicken in a dreadful state"
>
>All three are missing from the grammar of my lang. How do non-IE
>languages do these; that is: make something with the same
>meaning? I'm looking at examples from Mongolian right now:
>
>http://coe-sun.kuis.ac.jp/coe/public/paper/outside/washio1.pdf
Before, when I googled for secondary predicates, what came up in the first
couple pages was IE. Good that you found something on Mongolian.

>AFMCL, it should be possible to do resultatives with serial verb
>constructions but as for depictives? Hmm..
>
>Is this a hole in your grammars also?
>
>
>t.
In both Naisek and PolyF, I have endings specifically for object-type
secondary predicates, whether depictive or resultative. The endings for
subject-type secondary predicates are identical to those for adverbs. I don't
think nouns can be used. I'm not sure what I've done in my earlier conlangs.

An example from PolyF:
Sêsel rufci ittimes coufe. - "That (yonder) dog came-here hot."
where |coufe| has the adverbial/subject agreement ending -e.

Jeff