Rezultativni sekundarni predikat u hrvatskome

Marković, Ivan. (2009). Rezultativni sekundarni predikat u hrvatskome. Suvremena lingvistika, 35(68). pp. 221-246. ISSN 1847-117X

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Abstract

Semantics of the secondary predicate (SP) in Croatian hasn’t been investigated enough. Hence its resultative meaning, different from the depictive one, hasn’t been noticed. Cross–lingustic studies so far showed that Croatian, being one of Slavonic languages, cannot have resultative SP due to two parameters: it doesn’t have productive root compounds formation of the noun (Snyder 2001), and it doesn’t allow goal PP to convert the action into accomplishment (Beck – Snyder 2001). In the paper a particular Croatian sentence type from the 19th century literature is described, with a noun in the instrumental case, as well as an adjective in the instrumental case, serving as a resultative SP. Contemporary Croatian speakers confirm its resultative meaning. The use of the instrumental case is connected with the resultative meaning of the instrumental case noun when serving as a complement of a semicopulative verb (e. g. postati ’become’, smatrati ’consider’ etc.), and with the strategy of avoiding syntactic ambiguity of the congruent adjective (that can be interpreted either as attributive or predicative one). The characteristics of resultative SP in Croatian are: 1. it’s a very rare construction, found in written language, nowadays rather archaic, 2. the primary predicate along which it is found must be a transitive perfective verb (usually derived with prefixes such as od–, pro–, raz–, za–), direct object being the host of resultative SP (if the host is the subject of a sentence, the meaning of the SP can be interpreted only as depictive), 3. primary predicate verb must denote a certain change of an object, with a possibility of further specification of that change (verbs like ubiti ’kill, murder’ are not good candidates); the result of the verbal action has to be expected, i. e. within the boundaries of lexical properties of the verb and the object, 4. it is expressed by so called indefinite adjective form in the instrumental case (Iskovao je sablju o{trom ’He hammered the sabre sharp’), by a noun in the instrumental case (Odgojio je sina po{tenjakom ’He raised his son a righteous man’), and by a PP, that can eventually blend into an adverb (O{i{ali su ga na }elavo ’They shaved him bold’), 5. the order of the resultative SP is the same as the order of other nonverbal SPs, post–verbal, but unlike depictive SP, resultative SP is not separated with comma intonation. Baker (2003) puts forth that, cross–linguistically, Adjective is the only lexical category that can serve as the resultative SP. In this paper a rare Croatian construction is described in which resultative secondary predicate is expressed by the Noun.

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