Depictive and Resultative Constructions in Hatam

Abstract

This paper examines depictive and resultative constructions in Hatam, a Papuan language spoken in the Bird’s Head region of West Papua, Indonesia. The study investigates how secondary predication is syntactically encoded and how multiple predicates interact within a single clause. The data were collected from three native speakers through elicitation sessions and naturally occurring speech and were analyzed using a qualitative descriptive approach. The findings show that Hatam exhibits flexible secondary predication structures in which adjectives, verbs, and adverbs may function as depictive or resultative predicates. Depictive constructions display structural ambiguity because descriptive elements may attach either to noun phrases or to clause-level predicates, resulting in multiple interpretations. Three major types of depictive constructions are identified: (1) adjectives modifying nouns and (2) adjectives modifying nouns while completing the clause predicate. Resultative constructions involve two interacting predicates that together form a complex predicate expressing a causal relationship between an event and its resulting state. This study contributes to the grammatical description of Hatam and provides additional empirical data for typological studies of secondary predication in Papuan languages