Depictive Secondary Predication and the Correlates of Inner Aspect

In this paper, I argue that depictive secondary predicates are sensitive to the inner aspect of the VP they are integrated into. I demonstrate that for adjectival depictives, adjective type can affect the acceptability of depictives that are predicated of the object of the matrix clause, and that this can be explained by the correlations between durativity and telicity in the verbal domain, and gradability and absoluteness in the adjectival domain. I propose the Depictive Aspectuality Constraint, and show that it makes a number of predictions about depictive behavior that are borne out.