RESULTATIVE SECONDARY PREDICATION IN ENGLISH AND EQUIVALENT CONSTRUCTIONS IN SERBIAN

Abstract

The paper deals with the verbless secondary predicate, also known as small clause and complex predicate. One part of its semantic potential is to express the state of a participant resulting from the action described by the clause. After a brief overview of several approaches to this topic, the first part focuses on syntactic and semantic description of resultative secondary predicates based on the criteria of verb transitivity, argument structure and their semantic roles. The second part is a corpus-based research of resultatives in English and their translation equivalents in Serbian and it aims to determine which resultatives are productive and how they may be grammaticalized in Serbian. Some of the conclusions are that resultatives are not frequently used in literary context and that the productive varieties are realized as AdjPs and PPs. Verbs which license resultatives may be transitive, intransitive, intransitive with fake objects and ergative and semantically they are mostly verbs of affect with several examples belonging to corporeal and speaking types. Since Serbian and English do not share the same mechanism for expressing resultative meaning, absolute equivalents are hard to find. However, APs tend to be translated mostly as PPs and AdvP, but also as finite and non-finite clauses, NPs and paraphrase. Omission of adjectives or even verbs produces creative but not always accurate translations.