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I was reading some manga when I encountered a rather curious turn of phrase: Come back to us a gorgeous beauty!

It suddenly dawned on me that I've seen very similar examples of NP secondary predicates in Elaine McNulty's 1988 dissertation (and other works on secondary predication):

(1) John left medical school a doctor

(2) Jill arrived at Cuba an anarchist

(3) They parted good friends

(4) Mary and Jane started that company two poor women

The VPs in these example seem to belong to a rather tight semantic class. Is there any general restriction on the verb itself? I.e. do they have to be sort-of unaccusative? What about the NPs? Do they necessarily have to be indefinite/weakly quantificational? Are they always interpreted as resultative? I would like to delve deeper into this topic but I don't know where to turn to.

Zoltan
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  • It's a fairly common construction but the final part of the sentence doesn't have to be a noun phrase, it can be a simple adjective or an adjectival phrase. For example "He went into the army flabby but came out tough" uses the construction twice to make the contrast but either of them could have been used on its own. – BoldBen Feb 24 '22 at 06:02
  • It's quite a common construction. The NPs are not quantificational but predicative in that they refer to a predicand ("John/Jill/They/Mary and Jane"). It would also be possible for the predicatives to occur in an as PP, cf. John left medical school as a doctor / They parted as good friends. – BillJ Feb 24 '22 at 08:12
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    These are predicative adjuncts. They're predicative in the sense they give more information about the subject. However, they are not routinely interpreted as resultatives. Jill's arriving in Cuba doesn't result in her being an anarchist, the parting does not make them friends and starting the company did not make the two women poor! In (1) it is not the case that leaving medical school resulted in John being a doctor. It's the other way round! :-) In true resultatives ("He hammered the metal flat") the predicative NP/ADjP or PP is a complement, not an adjunct. – Araucaria - Him Feb 24 '22 at 11:53
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    Does this answer your question? Verb *leave* and an unusual copular construction? //// This has been covered here before. 'Leave' can take either depictive or resultative further predication: John left the island a sick man (subject-orientated; probably depictive) // These sad events left Jill a changed woman (object-orientated; resultative). – Edwin Ashworth Feb 24 '22 at 14:40
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    Note that non-transfer 3-place predicates like elect, select, choose also allow as with the second object They elected/selected/chose Melvin (as) their representative. And the first object can be passivized. Melvin was elected/selected/chosen as their representative. Note also that these can take infinitive complements as well: They elected/selected/chose Melvin to represent them. In passive even. There's more going on here than a label. – John Lawler Feb 24 '22 at 17:11

1 Answers1

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In your examples, the noun phrase as complement acts adverbially. As such, they are not going to be resultative: the website Infobloom.com comments

For example, "she lifted 20 pounds." The words "20 pounds" tell the audience how much she lifted, not what she lifted, so they are acting as adverbial nouns. Likewise, in the sentence, "Heidi starts school this autumn," the word "autumn" serves as an adverbial noun. This example also contains an object: "school."

Greybeard
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    These noun phrases aren't complements! – Araucaria - Him Feb 24 '22 at 11:54
  • @Araucaria-Nothereanymore. you are saying that in "John left [medical school] a doctor", "a doctor" is not a complement? But I assume you agree that "medical school" is the object of "left"? – Greybeard Feb 24 '22 at 22:04
  • Yes, on both counts (not my dv, btw!) – Araucaria - Him Feb 24 '22 at 22:06
  • @Araucaria-Nothereanymore. And do you see "a doctor" as adverbial? – Greybeard Feb 24 '22 at 22:19
  • Well outside of fiddly left-edge dependents like Determiners and Subjects, there are three basic syntactic functions/grammatical relations: Head, Complement and Modifier. At clause or VP level these often have special names such as Predicate, Object etc. Like many modern grammarians I eschew the label 'Adverbial', and instead use the term Adjunct for sentence or VP-level Modifiers. But basically Adjuncts and Adverbials are the same type of ... – Araucaria - Him Feb 25 '22 at 11:43
  • ... syntactic function/grammatical relation. So, to answer your question, yes, like CGEL and most other grammars, I view 'a doctor' as a Modifier, or more specifically an Adjunct there. However, notice that semantically it's modifying/predicating something about the subject NP, John. That makes the term Adverbial very uncomfortable, because it's not very 'adverby' to modify an NP (it's more adjective-like). But the term Adverbial really just means Modifier and the adverb- root there is just an unfortunate inconvenience. So, yes, it's an Adjunct/Adverbial/Modifier, take your pick! – Araucaria - Him Feb 25 '22 at 11:50