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"He was found innocent."

How exactly does this work? Is it just an idiomatic contraction of 'found to be innocent'?

What about "He was found alive"? 'Found' here is working a lot like a causative verb such as 'made'.

{If I put a comma in here it is a different sentence. "He was found, alive." Then it's a parenthetical or perhaps some kind of parallelism ('he was found, he was alive'). Nothing mysterious about that.}

Is there a structure here that I'm missing? Something a bit like a causative verb, but not? There are simple and obvious examples: "It was built tall", "It was built to last", "He was worried sick".

Dunsanist
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    What's the difference between this question and your previous question, How to analyse “Shot dead”? –  Jun 01 '16 at 13:36
  • I'm not sure that 'found alive' or 'found innocent' work the same way as 'shot dead'. I'm pretty sure that 'Shot dead' works the way that Silenus is talking about. But if 'found' works much like made--'found alive', 'made sick'--then it really extends or stretches the list of verbs that can behave this way. And what about 'build'? Perhaps what Silenus talks about is the common structure I'm missing--one that works not just with causative verbs but others as well. – Dunsanist Jun 01 '16 at 14:13
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    Then, you need to be more specific on why you need to ask this question again by (1) linking the previous question, (2) detailing what you understand from the previous question, (3) detailing what still bothers you. "They (he or she) shot him dead", "They found him innocent", "They found him alive". Are there any difference? –  Jun 01 '16 at 14:19
  • These are all examples of 'object complement'. – AmI Jun 01 '16 at 21:20
  • "it really extends or stretches the list of verbs that can behave this way" - that only happens because you seem to think this was a short list. There's no valid reason to believe that, I think. – oerkelens Jun 02 '16 at 12:14
  • 'Object complements'--yes, fair enough. Is there any restriction on what verbs can behave this way? – Dunsanist Jun 06 '16 at 08:29

1 Answers1

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This is fairly speculative, but...

In your examples, 'found' is behaving similarly to 'made'.

'Made' is often analyzed as a verb which takes as its complement a small clause (a structure comprising a subject and non-verbal predicate).

For example,

  • They made her president.

In this sentence, 'her' is the subject of the small clause and 'president' is its non-verbal predicate.

Compare a similar example involving 'found' (in active voice):

  • They found her innocent.

Here, a plausible analysis is that 'her' is the subject of a small clause and 'innocent' is its non-verbal predicate.

When you move to passive constructions like

  • He was found innocent.

there may be syntactically unpronounced constituents or traces which occur after 'found'. The deep structure of such constructions is probably controversial.

DyingIsFun
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