Adjectival 'as'-phrases as intensional secondary predicates

Abstract

This paper focuses on adjectival as-phrases that co-occur with transitive verbs, and contribute additional information on the verb’s internal arguments. I claim that these as-phrases behave like secondary predicates, specifically object-oriented depictives, but—in contrast to object-oriented depictives—contribute intensional content, a modal property. In the course of the paper, I delimit the type of as-phrases that are covered in this paper, and propose a formal analysis for these cases that builds on results by Rothstein (2003) on object-oriented depictives, and the notion of information-based modality in Kratzer 2012. I show how the analysis captures the entailment patterns found with these as-phrases, and how it can be extended to related nominal as-phrases.