black WITH grease, white WITH rage

[esmanning]

Both in Little Prince chapter 7:

He looked at me there, with my hammer in my hand, my fingers black WITH engine-grease .... sent_id = lpp_1943.325

The little prince was now white WITH rage. sent_id = lpp_1943.341

Manner? Explanation? Also considered Theme\~Instrument for the first (like covered WITH grease) for the first, but if so it doesn't seem to fit the second as well.

[nschneid]

Theme~Instrument intuitively works better with a participle like "covered with", "dotted with", "filled with", which inherently describe a configurational relation between two entities. But it seems odd to assign a plain color adjective a role for the material causing the coloration.

How else can this construction be used, besides colors? "The forest is dense with trees"? If it requires a material of sorts, would Stuff work, or would that be pushing it?

"bursting with pride" seems similar...Explanation???

cf. "I am high on painkillers"

[nschneid]

"He looked at me there, with my hammer in my hand, my fingers black with engine-grease": both the chaining of depictives and the "black with MATERIAL" construction evoke a narrative style.

• He looked at me (1) there, (2) with my hammer in my hand, (3) my fingers black WITH engine-grease

These 3 depictive phrases all pertain to me. Note this could be rephrased:

• (1) There, (2) with my hammer in my hand, (3) my fingers black with engine-grease, I stood.

So I don't think "there" marks the location of the looking event.

(2) and (3) are absolute clauses. The WITH in (2)—which happens to be omissible—introduces the depiction, so I think it is Characteristic.

"Fingers (that are) black WITH grease": One way to look at it is that the fingers are black and the grease is the instrument of blackness. Another interpretation is that the fingers have grease which induced blackness (almost like a resultative: fingers that were greased black), and this odd construction inverts the structure so the head is the color rather than the material (sort of raising). Consider:

• He is lousy with money
  • This sense of "lousy" glossed as "full of or teeming with".
  • = He has a ton of money
• We are inundated/flooded with complaints.
  • = We have a ton of complaints

I think this is an interesting construction (or family of constructions), but for now I'm inclined to go with a superficial syntactic reading of the dependencies, and treat WITH as marking a Theme of the adjective.

See also: #12