Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Grammar-holes: secondary predication

From:taliesin the storyteller <taliesin-conlang@...>
Date:Tuesday, June 5, 2007, 11:17
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

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.

Reply

Roger Mills <rfmilly@...>