Do ″Transitive Adjectives″ Really Exist\ulcorner

  • Published : 2002.02.01

Abstract

I argue that the so-called psychological predicates like komapta ′thankful,′ mwusepta ′fearful,′ silhta ′loathsome,′ or kulipta ′missing′require a nominative subject and a locative or dative complement, challenging the claim, a conventional wisdom originated from Kuno(1973), that they are two-place "transitive adjectives" requiring a nominative direct object, I also show that those adjectives are subject to having the locative-dative complement extracted, which is ultimately realized as a focused subject or a topic. Thus, in this type of double nominative constructions, the first nominative is a focused subject, and the second nominative forms an embedded clause with the psychological predicate, which functions as the predicate of the whole sentence.

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