The Evil One

Copulae are intransitive.


If it was adverbial then you would expect it to have the possibility of appearing with other subcategorisation frames. However, it can't. Since adverbials are adjuncts you would not expect one to be dependent on the subcategorisation frame. Since "clean" is dependent on the subcategorisation frame, that suggests it's not an adverbial.


Very cute. However, the distinction that concerns me is not adj. versus adv. - that's incidental and as you suggest alien to most forms of English anyway - it's the distinction between adverbial and subject complement.

Chris Weimer

But not all intransitive verbs are copulae. You haven't provided anything new, and especially taking in what I just said, you still have a hurdle to jump over.

The Evil One

OK, then go on - provide an example of "clean" as an adverbial modifying one of the other subcategorisation frames.

I really can't think of an example.

Chris Weimer

He felt clean. To feel means to experience in the manner of X. Clean, here, is modifying how he feels. How does he feel? He feels clean.

gstafleu

Fascinating discussion. So what is the syntactic difference between "the dog is clean" and " the dog "smells clean"?

Gerard Stafleu

Chris Weimer

Quite a difference. "The dog is clean" is describing the dog's state of being - it's clean. "The dog smells clean" is describing how the dog smells, in this case, it smells clean. There's nothing in the second sentence which forces the dog to be clean. For all we know, it could smell clean but in reality really be dirty.

The Evil One

That's not what I was asking for. It's the same subcategorisation frame, but a different verb. You're proving my point for me, which is that

(a) smell and in fact most English perception verbs have a subcategorisation frame in which they take a subject with the semantic role of source and a subject complement

(EG he feels clean, the kettle feels hot, the dog smells clean, the dog smells terrible, he looks unhappy, the table appears solid, you sound bored, it seems unlikely)

(b) and that these subject complements cannot appear as such in any other subcategorisation frames they may have, such as the one with a subject-experiencer and an object-source:

(EG ??*he smelled the flowers clean, ??*he smelled the dog terrible, ??*he felt the kettle hot) <*>

(c) and that if these subj. comps. were actually adverbials, as you claim is a possibility, you'd expect them NOT to be limited to 1 subcategorisation frame. But they are. So they're not. (adverbials that is).

QED.

None. The only difference is lexical, i.e. the difference is in the semantic content of the verb. The syntactic structure is exactly the same.

Chris Weimar -- in your answer to gstafleu's Q, you're addressing semantic/pragmatic differences, all of which are traceable to the semantics of the verb and have nothing to do with the syntactic structure.

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<*> the reason I've marked these ??* instead of * is that I suppose there might be an example of this type that is OK. But I can't think of one, I can only think of really funny-sounding ones like the ones I've given.

Julian

I will ignore TonyN's opening post since it clearly demonstrates his inability to read and comprehend even simple sentences (Julian wrote: A noun cannot modify an adjective. TonyN then replies: go back to 3rd and 4th grade grammar. The adjective modifies the noun.)

There is an unfortunate tendency in modern colloquial speech to use adjectives in an adverbial role. Watching TV, an activity I rarely engage in, I frequently hear the following exchange:

Person A: "How are you doing?"
Person B: "I'm doing good."

To which my GF and I immediately say in unison, "Well!" When using 'good' here, person B is actually saying that he is doing some good deed, i.e. a noun is implied because we got the adjective and now we are waiting for the noun. Since person B is talking about how he is doing, he should be using an adverb, something which modifies a verb, namely 'doing.' Instead he answered the question, "What are you doing?" and he answered it in a manner that would be perfectly good Greek but not so correct in English.

The dog is clean, in addition to being a predicate nominative (another thing frequently messed up in English colloquial speech, should be "It is I" instead of "It is me."), it is also a predicate adjective, in Greek routinely formed without the explicit verb. It is also, as stated earlier quite correctly, a subject complement as it has to be in gramatically correct English.

The dog feels clean. Chris, here, is arguing semantically for adverbial usage. It is still an adjective, however, because it tells us something about the dog. The word 'clean' doesn't describe the verb, i.e. the nature, consistency, texture, quality, what-have-you of how the dog is doing the feeling. It is describing the feeling of the dog. In other words, it is describing what the dog feels, not how he feels it. We could turn it into the form used earlier by using a non-finite verb form like so, The feeling of the dog is clean.

A bit more:

Person A: "How does he smell?"
Person B: "Well."

Did he just describe the smelling ability of someone or his olfactory impact on the surroundings? Person B used an adverb and was therefore talking about the verb 'to do.' If he wanted discuss the external aromatic impression of the person in question he would have said, "Good."

Julian

Edited to add: The Evil One is basically correct in his arguments.

gstafleu

Sure, that is a difference in meaning, but is it a difference in syntax? Don't we in both cases have the structure "The dog <assign property> <property>"? One version is more emphatic in how reliable the assignment is, that's all.

Gerard Stafleu

gstafleu

If you rarely watch TV it is a bit difficult to frequently hear this, except perhaps in a relative sense: on the odd occasion when you turn on the thing you just trip over it. Which is of course what you meant, no doubt there, I know: I frequently have a similar problem with Playboy.

But back to the adverbializing of adjectives. We have "de mortuis nil nisi bene," which is inevitably translated by moralistic weenies as "about the dead nothing but good." Some of these weenies apparently have back-translated the expression to "de mortuis nil nisi bonum." O tempora o mores.

Gerard Stafleu