QUASIPREDICATIVE (Or Predicative Adjuncts) Palacios
Adverbial adjuncts vs. predicative adjuncts
Adverbial adjuncts modify the event as a whole. For example:
John killed Bill in Central Park. (Adverbial adjunct of place)
She buttered the bread slowly. (Adverbial adjunct of manner or speed)
a) Consider now the following sentence:
He died poor.
From a semantic point of view, die is a one-place verb, it takes one argument (he). It is not
part of the meaning of die that if you die you die poor. Poor predicates the state the person
was in when he died. The sentence can be paraphrased in the following way He was poor
when he died.
From a syntactic point of view, die is an intransitive verb of complete predication. Poor is an
adjunct, it is not required by the lexical meaning of die. However, it is an adjunct that
predicates something about the subject. We will call it predicative adjunct. This predicative
adjunct is subject-related, since poor predicates something about the subject of the sentence.
b) Other examples of predicative adjuncts which are subject related are:
He died a happy man. (He was a happy man when he died)
She married young. (She was young when she married)
They parted the best of friends. (They were the best of friends when they parted)
In the following sentences the predicative adjunct occurs with a transitive verb of complete
predication. Notice that we can have the same paraphrase:
She ate the meat naked. (She was naked when she ate the meat)
She left the school worried about the exam. (She was worried about the exam when
she left the school)
c) In this third group of sentences the predicative adjunct is object-related. It tells us
something about the complement/direct object. The predicative adjunct is not required by the
meaning of the verb. The complement/direct object is, and it receives a theta-role from the
verb.
She ate the meat raw. (The meat was raw when she ate it)
She drank her coffee strong. (The coffee was strong when she drank it)
She gave him the letter unopened. (The letter was unopened when she gave it to him)
Test: In order to test whether we’re dealing with a quasipredicative or not, we can transform the main
verb in a clause of time.
For example: They died poor When they died, they were poor (By doing this test we can check
that poor is not modifying the verb but instead it modifies the subject)
To sum up:
Predicative adjuncts can be subject-related or object-related. They contrast with adverbial
adjuncts because they do not modify the event as a whole. They are called predicative
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because they predicate something about the subject and the object respectively. They are
called adjuncts because they are not lexical requirements of the verb.