Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang

Particles as grammaticalized complex predicates 161
b. Sudse cooked them all [ PRED into a premature death] with her wild food.
(P. Chute. 1987. Castine. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, p. 78)
c. She might employ it [her body] as a weapon – fall forward and flatten
me [ PRED wafer-thin].
(Delia Ephron. 2000. Big City Eyes, New York: Bantam, p. 92)
At an abstract level, there is a subject-predicate relationship between the accusative
object and the complex predicate or object complement, i.e., between me
and awake, them and a premature death, and me and wafer-thin. A simplified representation
is the structure in (8), with an Agreement Phrase, with the empty head
Agr mediating between the object as the subject of the Agreement Phrase and its
adjectival predicate:
(8) VP
V AgrP
NP
me
Agr'
Agr AP
awake
Note that the NP me (the object) receives its thematic role from the predicate in
this representation, and has accusative case not because that case is assigned by
the verb but because the NP is the subject of the Agreement Phrase and accusative
is the default case for subjects in verbless or non-finite constructions. This means
that it is the predicate that licenses the object and not the verb, and this accounts
for the phenomenon of ‘unselected’ objects, i.e., cases where the verb on its own,
without the predicate, could not appear with the object (more about this phenomenon
in the next section).
The failure of most particles to function as a predicate in a copular construction
is often noted in the literature, e.g., Zeller (1999): *he is up/it is up (cf. phone
John up/eat up all the food etc.), but many predicates similarly fail to appear
straightforwardly in a copular construction; cf. the variability of (9a–f), rewriting
the predicates of (7) and (13) below as copular constructions:
(9) a. I am awake.
b. *They were into a premature death.
c. I am wafer-thin.
d. *The pub is dry.
e. *The daylights were out of the campers.
f. The dust is out of the sofa.