Abstract
The constructions with the structure Nsub-V-Nobj-ADJ in English can be constructed as adjunct-predicate constructions as well as causatives, resultatives and argument small clauses. For adjunct-predicate constructions referred to as depictives the adjunct-predicate can be subject-hosted, as in Jones fried the potatoes naked, or object-hosted, as in Jones fried the potatoes raw (rapoport 1993ab & 1999). This paper aims at first providing the corresponding constructions to express depictive Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM for short). Depictive in TSM are deployed more transparently as shown in its different sentential patterns: subject hosted adjunct-predicates occur in Nsub-ADJ-V-Nobj, as in A Ong-a thiam-thiam tih chu mi 阿旺仔悿悿煮麵 ‘Mike cooked the noodle tired’, or Nsub-vadjunct-V-nobj, as in A Ong-a chiu chui tih hang be-ling chu阿旺仔酒醉烘馬鈴薯 ‘Mike baked sweet potatoes drunk’. Object-hosted adjunct-predicates occur in Nsub-Adj-V-Nobj, as in A-Bing tia tia chiah chhi o a 阿明仔定定生吃耗子 ‘Tom often eat the oyster raw’ or the sui generic construction Nsub-CONJ(than 趁)-Nobj-ADJ-V, as in A Ong-a than thng sio sio lim loh-khi 阿旺仔趁湯燒燒飲落去 ‘Mike drank the soup hot’. We can see that the adjunct in depictive occurs after the main verb in English, whereas it is realized preverbally, be it subject-hosted or object-oriented, in TSM.The adjunct in a resultative rather a depictive as shown above appears after the object both in English and TSM. Thus, resultatives in TSM also observes the post-verbal constraint in that subject-hosted adjectives emerge as Nsub-V-Nobj-ADJ, as in A Lan-a lim chiu chui a 阿蘭仔飲酒醉矣 ‘Lisa became drunk by drinking’, and object-hosted adjectives can be manifested as Nsub-Nobj-V-ADJ, as in I thoo-kha- sau chhing –khi a 伊塗?掃清氣矣 ‘He swept the floor clean’.In sum, despite a difference in internal semantic relation there is no difference in syntactic structure between depictive and resultative in English. By contrast, TSM shows a parallelism between temporal order and word order, viz., the adjunct has to appear before the main verb in depictive and it occurs after the main verb in resultatives. The different semantic structure between the different sentence patterns is in a sense coded in surface word order.