English and other languages have these nasty little things which I learnt are called “object predicatives,” that is, attributive complements to objects of transitive verbs (cf. Biber et al. 50). Since that’s a mouthful of abstract linguistic terminology, here’s an example of what I mean:

In order to look up which ways there are crosslinguistically to deal with these constructions I looked into my copy of Describing Morphosyntax as well as WALS, but sadly I couldn’t find anything useful quickly when I looked for “object predicative” and “object complement.” Since I intended Ayeri to be generally (and I mean broadly generally) influenced by Austronesian languages, I also had a look into my Indonesian grammar for fun, to see how that would deal with object complements/predicatives:

We can see here that Indonesian also basically does it the same way as English by simply placing the adjective after the object NP. However, Indonesian, like English (on nouns at least), doesn’t mark case. German – although marking case all over the place – does it this way as well, though:

Now what about my conlang? First, let’s look at an adjective complement of an intransitive verb (i.e. a subject complement):

Now, to use the door-painting example from the beginning and the same sentence structure as with the previous example:

Certainly this is one strategy to express this sentence with the syntax built in analogy to the intransitive example, but we will run into trouble when the complement of the object is not an adjective but a proper NP:

Since noun phrases need to be case-marked in Ayeri, what case should depang ‘fool’ have? A second patient? A way to solve this might be to exclude the direct object of the verb from the main clause and to put it instead into its own complement clause (So many complements here, gotta be careful!):[2. I think I remember having read that Slavic languages have a similar strategy?]

Of course, we can then apply the same strategy to a sentence with an object predicative, and even one with a subject predicative, i.e. a predicative adjective modifying an intransitive verb:

However, I’m not too fond of dummy-it constructions in Ayeri as presented in the Surpreng, … example, so I’d rather prefer the first rendition of the sentence at the beginning of this article. The point I wanted to make about the Vitayāng, … example is that this way there is no ambiguity whether the blue door is painted or whether there is a door painted blue: Since adjectives follow their heads, kunang leno just on its own means ‘blue door’, which potentially causes confusion. I presume that in spoken language the disambiguation between either case happens by intonation,[3. How does Indonesian distinguish ‘his sad mother’ from ‘made his mother sad’, by the way? Please explain! :)] however, in writing – where intonation is absent – or so as to give clear orders to your craftsmen, you might prefer the complement-clause phrasing.