Secondary Predicates in Australian Languages

Constraints on noun phrase discontinuity in an Australian language: The role of prosody and information structure

“…The main arguments in support of the secondary predicate analysis are, first, that this type of structure is needed, in any case, to account for certain constructions, and second, that all nominals are really adjectival, i.e., "good predicates" and "bad arguments", because of the lack of a distinction between nouns and adjectives (see Section 2.2). Various authors (Austin and Bresnan 1996;Nordlinger 1998: 40 -43;Schultze-Berndt 2006) have pointed out problems with the generalization of a secondary predication analysis to all NPs; a distinction between the two construction types is also (if rather implicitly) made by Legate (2002: 114). These problems include the necessity to lift the crosslinguistically observed restriction on depictive secondary predicate constituents to expressions of temporary properties (stage-level predicates), the observation that subclasses of nominals in some languages may actually be restricted to functioning as true secondary predicates, and, most importantly, the blurring of a f undamental functional d istinction between establishing reference and predication, thus extending the notion of secondary predication far beyond its traditional meaning.…”

“…We propose, however, a distinction between discontinuous noun phrases and part-whole expressions of this type. As for the syntactic status of the body part expression, we follow authors such as McGregor (1985: 210), Harvey (1996), andSchultze-Berndt (2006) in considering them neither as part of the same noun phrase as the possessor nor as "secondary predicates" (as has been suggested by Hale [1981a]). Rather, we consider examples such as (20) as instances of a distinct external possessor construction where ngayug and jurruny are independent NPs and the latter is licensed by the semantic relationship of meronymy to the former; its function is to specify the locus of the possessor's involvement in the event.…”

5. Constituency and Grammatical Relations in Australian languages

“…Such secondary predicates are also oft en, although not necessarily, marked with temporal clitics that indicate the relative time at which the secondary predication holds (Hale 1983), and mark the nominal as a secondary predicate, rather than a modifi er. Further discussion of secondary predicates in diff erent Australian languages and in a cross-linguistic perspective can be found in Schultze-Berndt and Himmelmann (2004), Himmelmann and Schultze-Berndt (2005), Schultze-Berndt (2006) and McGregor (2005).…”