Do Transitive Adjectives Really Exist

I argue that the so-called psychological predicates like komapta 'thankful,' mwusepta 'fearful,' silhta `loathsome,' or kulipta 'missing' require a nominative subject and a locative or dative complement, challenging the claim, a conventional wisdom originated from Kuno(1973), that they are two-place "transitive adjectives" requiring a nominative direct object.I also show that those adjectives are subject to having the locative-dative complement extracted, which is ultimately realized as a focused subject or a topic.Thus, in this type of double nominative constructions, the first nominative is a focused subject, and the second nominative forms an embedded clause with the psychological predicate, which functions as the predicate of the whole sentence.