Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

In each of these examples, the secondary predicate is in bold and occurs in sentence final
position in English—the subscripted indices indicate which words are coreferential.
Examples (3a) and (3b) are “depictive” secondary predicates in that they qualify a
particular nominal argument throughout the entire duration of the event denoted by the
main predicate: the implication is that John is drunk throughout the period of time in
which he drove and that the coffee, likewise, is hot throughout the time it took to drink it.
The “resultative” secondary predicate in (3c), unlike the depictive ones in (3a) and (3b),
is only true upon completion of the event denoted by the main predicate, so the house is
red in its entirety only at the completion of John’s act of painting and, in somewhat
informal terms, the degree to which the direct object has the property attributed to it by
the adjective that acts as the secondary predicate corresponds to the degree to which the
event referred to by the main predicate is complete (see Rothstein 2004 for detailed
criticism of the view that the direct object can serve as a true index of the relative
completion of the event, cf. Krifka 1989). The literature on secondary predication is still
somewhat inchoate and difficult to follow, but Rothstein notes several important points:
(a) whereas resultative secondary predicates are limited in application to adjectival
modifiers of direct objects, depictive secondary predicates can modify either subject or
object of a transitive verb, (b) where the primary verb is intransitive, it can be
transitivized so as to make available a direct object for secondary predication either
through the use of a “fake-reflexive” (John laughed himself i sick i [Rothstein 2004, 60, ex.
4c]) or a “non-thematic object” (John sang the baby i asleep i [Rothstein 2004, 60, ex. 4d]),
and (c) the use of adjectives as the basis for secondary predication means that the
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