Depictive secondary predicates in crosslinguistic perspective EVA SCHULTZE-BERNDT and NIKOLAUS P. HIMMELMANN Linguistic Typology 8 (2004), 59–131 1430–0532/2004/008-059 c Walter de Gruyter Abstract Little is known about depictive secondary predicates such as raw in She ate the fish raw in languages other than a few European ones. The goal of this paper is to broaden the database for this grammatical construction by reviewing its recurring formal properties, introducing a crosslinguistically applicable def- inition and delimiting it from other, semantically and/or morphosyntactically similar constructions. In particular, we will show that the distinction between depictives and adverbials is much less clearcut, both in formal and semantic terms, than is often assumed. First, languages may not formally distinguish the two construction types. Second, in languages with genuine depictive construc- tions distinct from adverbials, expressions that have generally been analysed as adverbials (e.g., expressions of concomitance, manner, location, and even time) may exhibit the formal properties of depictives. As a consequence, we ar- gue that adverbial and depictive constructions are in competition, in the sense that languages may have different cut-off points for the two construction types on an implicational hierarchy ranging from typical depictive content to typical adverbial content. Keywords: adjunct, adverbial, agreement, case, complex predicate, control, converb, depictive, predicate complement, resultative, secondary predication, small clause, word class 1. Introduction One of the essential characteristics of a secondary predicate construction is the fact that a single clause contains two predicative constituents, which do not form a complex predicate in the way serial verbs or periphrastic predicates do.