Re: painting the door green

On Sun, 2008-08-24 at 18:24 +0200, René Uittenbogaard wrote:

> I'm looking for the English grammatical term for what is known in
> Dutch as the "bepaling van gesteldheid"
> It is a constituent which is, among others, found in sentences like:
>
> He is painting the door *green*.
> She bought the store *empty*.
> They applauded *the skin off their hands*.
The terms I'm used to are "co-predication", or "secondary predication".

Incidentally, I avoid going to Wikipedia for terminology: I see so many
faults relating to things I know, that I'm not inclined to trust them
for things I don't. After all, any idiot can register and post!

The construction seems to be largely confined to European and Australian
languages. Its characteristics are that

1. The subject of the co-predicate is unexpressed. In "He is painting
the door green", it is the same as the object of the primary predicate;
but in "He came home drunk", the same as the subject.

2.The secondary predicate is dependent grammatically on the primary one,
but their relationship is not explicit. The door will be green after the
painting, but the store was empty before the buying.

Rather different, of course, is "They elected him secretary", where
"him" and "secretary" both depend on the same verb, and "secretary" is
the objective complement.

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