Original scientific paper
Resultative secondary predicates in Croatian
Ivan Marković
; Filozofski fakultet u Zagrebu
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 boun-daries 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 oštrom ’He hammered the sabre sharp’),
by a noun in the instrumental case (Odgojio je sina poštenjakom ’He raised his son a righteous
man’), and by a PP, that can eventually blend into an adverb (Ošišali su ga na ćelavo ’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.
Keywords
secondary predicate; resultative; instrumental case; lexical category; Croatian
Hrčak ID:
47109
URI
Publication date:
16.12.2009.
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