What is this adjective doing here?

[din]

Hi!
It's been a while. Hope you're all doing well.

I'm trying to translate something into my conlang, but I don't know what type of thing this is, or what to do with it:

1. He was so far gone that he could hardly walk
2. She was so shy that she didn't want to show her face
3. The balloon went up so high that it was lost to sight
4. The blow sent him flying so far that he slammed into the wall behind him

I understand that 'that' introduces an adverbial clause (underlined) which modifies the preceding adjective (bold). Or perhaps it modifies the entire preceding clause. Either way, that's not the issue I have. At least this part is consistent and predictable.

The problem I have is the adjective. In the 1st and 2nd sentence, we can say that it's a predicate adjective, but in the 3rd and 4th sentence it's not. The verbs 'to go' and 'to send' are not copulas. If they are not copulas, they can't modify the subject. While in the 3rd sentence, it's clearly the balloon that's high, an adjective modifying 'balloon' should not be found in this position. Even worse, in the 4th sentence, I don't even know what 'far' is modifying. If it's modifying 'flying', it's not an adjective at all, but an adverb...

Help

[Richard W]

The word 'far' is most simply parsed as an adverb in sentences 1 and 4. In sentence 1, 'gone' is a past participle with active meaning, and 'far gone' is parallel to 'long gone'.

The word 'high' in sentence 3 is also and adverb. One technical difficulty is accounting for the choice between 'high' and 'highly' as the adverb (as in 'to think highly of someone or something).

[zompist]

First thought, it shouldn't be a surprise if some of these are adverbs: so can modify both adjectives ("he is so boring") and adverbs ("he speaks so slowly").

In your examples it seems to be "so" that licenses the subclause-- none of them work without it.

Second, I suspect "go/fly far" is either a survival or analogy from the time when English didn't distinguish the two. Compare the expression "hold fast", which is so archaic that it preserves the original sense of "fast" (as "firm, steady"). There's still a number of constructions where a modifier is adjectival in form, adverbial in meaning: dig deep, go slow, think/work/drink hard, speak true, come quick, go big, go straight, go dark, sell short, appear last, smell good, come close, fall silent.

[akam chinjir]

The constructions in (3) and (4) look resultative to me. As in, the balloon went, and as a result it was high; the blow sent him flying, and as a result he was far (away). The fact that "far" is fine though you'd need "far away" in a regular predication maybe suggests these are not regular adjectives, and since "adverb" just means "none of the above," maybe that'd make them adverbs.

They're not manner adverbs. And they pretty clearly don't describe the event as a whole: "sent someone flying far" does not describe a send-flying event that took place far away. (And actually, it seems you need "far away" there too.)

Maybe analogous to "crazy" in "go crazy"? Which pretty clearly has the form of an adjective, not a manner adverb.

[zompist]

That reminds me of Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, and specifically his discussion of trajectories.

Resultative is close, but not quite it, I think. If it was a resultative I'd expect more results would work:

The balloon went, and as a result it was shot / lost / spotted.
*The balloon went shot/lost/spotted.

Instead, maybe it's "the balloon went, and the end of its trajectory was high" / "the blow sent him flying, and the end of his trajectory was far".

Compare "The wind blew it over the river", "The houses get smaller up the street."

[Moose-tache]

I'm a little confused, in that I don't see the issue. We can re-write these sentences like this:

He was far gone, to the extent that he could hardly work.
She was shy, to the extent that she didn't want to show her face.
The balloon went up high, to the extent that it was lost to sight.
The blow sent him flying far, to the extent that he slammed into the wall behind him.

Some of these are a little stilted, but bear with me. In each of these we have two clauses with a conjunctive phrase in between: "[clause1] to the extent that [clause2]," which indicates that clause 1 modulates, causes, or determines the magnitude of clause 2. "so angry that he cried" masks this relationship slightly by putting grammatical elements both between and inside the clauses, but functionally it's doing the same thing. The only difference is that "so [adj/adv] that [clause]" allows you to target the adjective or adverb that does the modulating, whereas "to the extent that" must treat the whole first clause as a modulator. However, the way in which the first element is modulating the second element is the same.

In this analysis, whether the modulating word is an adjective or an adverb is immaterial. In a language other than English, they could be clearly marked for part of speech, or there might not be two separate parts of speech at all. To my ear, 1 and 2 are adjectives and 3 and 4 are adverbs formed from adjectives by regular processes that are contingent to the history of English. Either way the relationship between the first and second elements is clear.

[akam chinjir]

That reminds me of Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, and specifically his discussion of trajectories. [...]

Yeah, that seems right. I've seen the word "path" used with about the same sense. I think I'd count paths/trajectories, as well as destinations, as results, though the relatively productive pattern here does seem to want specifically trajectories.

Edit: well, or count paths/trajectories and results as part of some larger category, if that makes a difference.

[cedh]

1. The balloon went up so high that it was lost to sight
2. The blow sent him flying so far that he slammed into the wall behind him

[...]
The verbs 'to go' and 'to send' are not copulas. If they are not copulas, they can't modify the subject. While in the 3rd sentence, it's clearly the balloon that's high, an adjective modifying 'balloon' should not be found in this position. Even worse, in the 4th sentence, I don't even know what 'far' is modifying. If it's modifying 'flying', it's not an adjective at all, but an adverb...

Adding to what the others have said (especially zompist and Moose-tache):
If you consider only the main clause part of the 3rd and 4th sentence, "high" and "far" are instances of what often get called secondary predicates. In "The balloon went up high", it's a secondary predication on the subject "the balloon" - it went up, and it also ended up in a high position - and in "The blow sent him flying far [away]", it's a secondary predication on the object "him" - he was sent flying by the blow, and he also ended up far away.

(Whether these are instances of resultative secondary predicates specifically is indeed up for debate - I'd say yes, but these are definitely not textbook examples, which would be something like "I ran myself tired" or "the smith pounded the metal flat", where the secondarily predicated state is a direct result of the action in the primary predicate. Resultative trajectory seems to fit quite well though.)

[jal]

It would be interesting to see how other, non-IE languages handle the "so X that Y" sentences, where X is an adjective and Y a subclause.


JAL

[din]

Thanks everyone for your replies. Very interesting! And I'd never heard of secondary predicates, so that gave me something to read about.

It would be interesting to see how other, non-IE languages handle the "so X that Y" sentences, where X is an adjective and Y a subclause.

Yes, please share!