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  1. He lay staring into the sky.
  2. He came running towards me.
  3. He arrived finding nobody there.

I have read this by John Lawler but am struggling to put these into one of the five categories he mentioned.

They appear to be closest to adverbial clauses but have several issues including:

  • Cannot add have to the start of them.
  • Cannot be introduced by subordinating conjunctions.
  • Cannot be moved around, at least not without sounding strange.

It seems this is because there is a certain temporal element to these participial clauses where one action has to happen first before the other; this is epitomized by the last example.

In fact, I'm not even sure if the third example is in the same category as the first two, because it can be re-written as:

3*) He arrived to find nobody there. (which is an adverbial Infinitive Phrase, right?)

So what category(s) do these examples belong to?

Joe
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  • Where do you get the idea that adverb clauses all have those characteristics? There are a LOT of different adverb clause types, and each of them has different characteristics. – John Lawler Jul 01 '20 at 02:11
  • @JohnLawler Well with regards to present participle adverbial clauses, I got those ideas from your post that I linked, as well as your comments from this post quote: "That's pretty clearly an adverbial; it can be moved around -- Wearing a t-shirt I went to work. -- Adjectives can't move around, and adverbs can." – Joe Jul 01 '20 at 12:00
  • @JohnLawler So which category do these participial phrases in my examples fall into (I'd be guessing the fourth)? Or are they none of those (perhaps serial verb constructions of two or more verbs in sequence?) – Joe Jul 01 '20 at 12:08
  • That is not a complete list, nor was it intended to be. If you want a complete list, consult the literature, not the net. And you'll have to learn quite a bit of syntactic theory, too, to cope with the terminology that gets tossed around. We're a long long way from saying that this is a number 3 adverb. – John Lawler Jul 01 '20 at 15:10
  • @JohnLawler I see. So are these examples serial verb constructions, or if not, what should we view them as? Hoping for an actual answer. – Joe Jul 01 '20 at 17:04
  • There's too little data to give a definite answer - three artificial sentences without context. My first thought is that all the matrix verbs are human locatives: lay, came, arrived. They require human subjects and refer to human activity and location. As for the clauses, they all take A-Equi. The first two seem to refer to simultaneous location or activity, while the third one indicates temporal order (arrival before discovery) of punctual events rather than simultaneity. Though that could vary in context, it can't be fronted like the first two. – John Lawler Jul 01 '20 at 17:21
  • The first one is predicative, but a depictive adjunct (your adverbial) not a complement. The second one is probably a complement. While it's tempting to say the third is catenative complement, it's probably best analysed as an adjunct indicating a resultant or subsequent situation. – BillJ Jul 01 '20 at 18:37
  • @BillJ Wait, so are you saying the first one is a predicative complement or depictive adjunct? Also in what sense are you using the word complement when you talk about the second example? (sorry because there are an awful lot of ways the word is used) – Joe Jul 02 '20 at 19:03

1 Answers1

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They are all adjuncts ('adverbials' in traditional grammar) in clause structure - the first two are depictive giving descriptive information, and the last one resultative expressing a subsequent situation (CaGEL p1224).

In the first two the situations are simultaneous and could be paraphrased crudely as:

He was lying on the ground and staring into the sky at the same time.

He was coming toward me and running at the same time.

In the last one the gerund-participial (-ing clause) expresses a situation subsequent to and dependent on that of the main clause, and could be paraphrased as:

When he arrived, he found no one there.

DW256
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