Sintaktisko sakaru robežgadījumi: sekundāri predikatīvs sakars un pakārtojums
Borderline cases of syntactic relations: Secondary predication and subordination

Summary/Abstract: The article is devoted to the analysis of borderline cases between two types of syntactic relations – subordination and secondary predication, based on the usage of the nominative and accusative forms of the adjective or its substitute and the instrumental form of the noun. The adjective in the nominative and the noun in the instrumental may be involved in the primary predication as well, however, this aspect is not analysed in detail. Any word form involved in the relation of secondary predication in Latvian grammatical tradition is called the secondary predicate (sekundāri predikatīvs komponents). A subordinated adjective in the nominative or the accusative fulfils the function of an attribute, whereas a noun in the instrumental is subordinated to a verb and has the function of the adverbial of manner. The article seeks both formal and semantic criteria for distinguishing the functions of the aforementioned word forms. One of the formal criteria is word order, namely, an attribute is most often placed in front of the noun, whereas the place of a secondary predicate in the sentence is not strictly determined. An additional criterion is the word class of the predicate, as in a nominal sentence the attributive function is assigned to the adjective or its substitute irrespective of word order. However, the main factor distinguishing subordination and secondary predication is the semantic one. The feature expressed by the attribute is not considered important in the situation of speech, whereas the secondary predicate denotes a feature temporally dependent on the primary predication and thus actualised.

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