§5 Five canonical clause structures 77In the first case, a friend of mine is ascriptive. I might be talking about someone
I had thought of as a friend but who let me down. The mistake was in believing
he had the properties one expects of a friend.
In the second case, a friend of mine is specifying. Here I might be talking about
someone who looked like my oid friend Bob, so I gave him a big hug, and then
realised that I was hugging a total stranger. The mistake in this case was believ
ing him to be Bob.Predicative complements with verbs other than be are ascriptive
With verbs other than be, predicative complements are almost always ascriptive.
Notice, for example, that such verbs as seem and become could replace be in the
[a] examples of [26], but not in the [b] ones (e.g., Mike seemed a loyal party mem
ber is fine, but *The last person to leave seemed lane is not). And when we said in
the discussion of [18] that predicative complements do not refer to people or other
kinds of participant in a situation, we were considering only the ascriptive use:
predicative complements of the specifying type can be referential, as lane in [26ib]
clearly is.
Syntactic differences
The semantic difference illustrated in [26] is reflected in the syntax in various ways.
The most important concerns the effect of reversing the order of the expressions in
subject and predicative complement position. Compare:
[28] ASCRIPTIVE
i a. The next point is more serious.
ii a. More serious is the next point.SPECIFYING
b. The one they arrested was Max.
b. Max was the one they arrested.
When we reverse the order in the specifying construction we change the func
tions. Thus while Max is predicative complement in [ib], that is not true in [iib]:
there Max is subject. This can be demonstrated by applying the interrogative test
for subjects: the interrogative of [iib] is Wa s Max the one they arrested?, with
Max in the distinctive subject position following the auxiliary.
With the ascriptive construction it is often not possible to reverse the two ele
ments, but when reversal is acceptable the effect is merely to reorder them, not
to change their functions. Thus more serious is predicative complement in non
canonical [iia] just as it is in [ia]. Note, for example, that we cannot invert it
with the auxiliary verb to form an interrogative (cf. *Is more serious the next
point?).5 Five canonical clause structures
As we have seen, all canonical clauses contain a subject and a predica
tor, but the presence of complements of different sorts (objects and predicative com
plements, for example) depends on the choice of verb. We can now distinguish five