Depictive secondary predication and quantization

This thesis analyses depictive secondary predicates and their restrictions. Depictives can be predicated of either the subject or object of a clause (e.g. John ate the fish drunk vs John ate the fish raw). These types are known as Subject-oriented and Object-oriented depictives respectively. Object-oriented depictives show more restrictions in their distribution than Subject-oriented depictives, e.g. Johni pushed Maryj drunki /∗j . This depends on the verb class, and Object-oriented depictives are generally most acceptable when predicated of objects of accomplishment verbs. This restriction has led to the claim that Object-oriented depictives are unacceptable with non-accomplishment verbs. However, this is incorrect, and there are cases of Object-oriented depictives being acceptable with non-accomplishment verbs, like e.g. John pushed the cart loaded. This thesis addresses this variable acceptability, and presents an account that captures and explains the difference in acceptability of Object-oriented depictives with different verb classes. The variable acceptability of Object-oriented (adjectival) depictives with objects of activity verbs depends on the type of adjective scale used, and this is ultimately due to the depictive’s sensitivity to quantization. Since quantization surfaces in various domains (e.g. Mass/Count in nominal, telic/atelic in verbal, Closed/Open scales in adjectival, Stage-Level/Individual-Level predicate in the predicative domain), this predicts that depictive acceptability should interact with changes in these domains, which is shown to be borne out. This can be extended to interactions with lexical aspect more generally, which captures the variable acceptability of Object-oriented depictives with different verb classes. Based on this, this thesis poses the Depictive Aspectuality Constraint: Object-oriented depictives and the sentence they are contained within must be aspectually compatible with durativity and quantization. This constraint gi