Pernilla Hallonsten Halling

Are manner adverbs secondary predicates?

Some of the alleged shared characteristics of depictives, resultatives, and manner adverbs require closer examination. One such point is the simultaneity of the property and the main event, which many scholars argue to be a shared feature of depictives and construc- tions with manner adverbs (e.g. Loeb-Diehl 2005, Verkerk 2009, Croft in prep.). In the case of depictives, this simultaneity is obvious – in example (3.14) above, the fish was raw when, or simultaneously to, being eaten. But in example (3.18), this argumentation hardly makes sense – ‘The running was slow while he performed it’ is a dubious para- phrase. The problem here is that slowly relates to ran in a different way from how raw relates to fish, and what is more, to the eating of the fish. The fish may or may not be raw whether it is being eaten or not, which is why it can be raw simultaneously with being eaten. In contrast, the running cannot be slow without being performed, and it cannot be performed without being so at a certain pace. Thus, running and being slow can simply not be accurately or sufficiently described as simultaneous, since they both describe aspects of the same event. Alternatively, a great many things would have to be described as simultaneous, but this does not seem to apply in other cases (e.g. for a good book, ‘the book was good while it was a book’ simply does not make sense). In this way, the simultaneity characteristic that depictives and manner adverbs are supposed to share can be questioned for the latter.
If secondary predicates are to be defined semantically – and note that whether this is the case is not explicit in the accounts discussed in sections 3.3.2–3.3.3 – then it should be possible to turn a secondary predicate into a primary predicate. Attempts to do so with the examples discussed in the previous section are presented in table 3.2.
Table 3.2. Turning secondary predicates into primary predicates