those adjectives

[ackerman at ling.ucsd.edu]

with respect to predicate adjective/nominal constructions, joan summarizes
miriam's observations
and herself observes that there is evidence for distinct representations
for otherwise identical lexical entries distinguished by the presence or
absence of a subject complement.  i repeat the relevant part
of joan's message and then continue with a small point below.
>
>4. copular constructions: verbless predications abound, and support a
>subject of predication in nonverbs.
>
>	About this, Miriam says:
>
>    This is a fairly reasonable way to proceed, but I personally
>    would rather adopt an approach in which the overt copulas do
>    get to have predicative force. In those constructions without
>    an overt copula, I would want to adopt something akin to
>    a constructional grammar approach --- we know it has to be
>    a copular construction by it's structure, so it gets a
>    subcat frame supplied *by virtue of the construction*
>    (in practical terms through an empty category).
>
>Many of the cases of verbless predication and "small clauses" have no
>syntactic place for an empty copula (e.g. examples like those in point
>2. above).  Cf.:
>
> *He became to be ever more liable to tergiversate....
> *Consider yourself to be lucky.
>
>And much has been written about the subtle semantic differences
>between predicate complement constructions with and without the
>copula. E.g. example (a) suggests direct perception; (b) does not.
>
>a. I found him repellent.
>b. I found him to be repellent.
>
>Better examples could be dug up from the literature on this (e.g. Ann
>Borkin's thesis).
>
>Finally, Miriam points to the advantages of the subjectless adjective
>analysis:
>
>>1) F-structures are less cluttered.
>
>	Hmmm.  But they're prettier and more uniform.
>
>>2) If you decide to believe the above arguments from anaphora
>>   and copula constructions (arguments A2 and A3), then you also
>>   commit yourself to having all nouns (and PPs) have subjects.
>>   In practical terms this means that you must have a disjunction
>>   in all your noun entries:
>>
>>           Hans<Subj>
>>   and     Hans
>>
>>   That is because you will not always want your noun to come
>>   with a subject ---- you actually only want it in predicative
>>   contexts, but not in:  Hans sees a dog.
>
>Yes, and there is evidence for this distinction.

it strikes me that there is an instructive and relevant class of
constructions beyond those that do
or do not contain copular elements:  there are languages where predicate
adjectives/nominals bear
agreement morphology reflecting person/number properties of a subject
complement:  schematically,
bird pretty-3sg, birds pretty-3pl, you pretty-2sg etc.  one such language,
namely,
nenets (belonging to the samoyedic family of uralic) was discussed in a
paper at lfg96 grenoble by
gert webelhuth and myself  (the html version of the paper online contains
garbled diacritics for all
of the examples, so i'd be happy to send a corrected version to anyone
interested).   as we argue there, it is quite clear that all substantivals
(i.e., proper
nouns, common nouns, adjectives and pronouns) functioning predicatively
should be associated
with a subject function:  among other things, the account of agreement
across predicators of different categories is unified if they all select
for subjects.  on the other hand,  there is no evidence that e.g. nominals,
functioning as complements of predicates, as in "hans sees a dog", are
argument-taking elements.  this, of course, leads to the sort of
disjunction mentioned in the preceding paragraph, but it seems a
well-motivated distinction.  i'll have to read joan's chapter to see what
arguments she specifically has in mind.

i'd like to thank miriam for engaging in a substantive discussion on this
list: it's refreshing and hopefully will elicit useful insights and
analyses.

-farrell