More than once I have translated stories where a perfect participle is used as a predicate adjective and it is necessary to look at the story context and how it flows to determine which of the two is the more accurate translation but are there other clues as well?
It’s basically just context, but some of it is because of the differences between English and Latin. Latin doesn’t have an aspectual distinction between aorist and perfect although English (and Greek) do. For instance, if a Roman points to a dead man lying on the ground and says “mortuus est”, does he mean “he died” or “he is dead”? The Latin is ambiguous as to aspect, but when translating into English we must choose one. I read somewhere once that a good rule of thumb is to take perfect participles as adjectives by default unless context says otherwise, which would mean that in this case “he is dead” is the way to render it.
Thanks, Calvinist. It sounds like a good rule of thumb. In the past I would have said “he died” simply for no other reason that the word “est” is the last word in the sentence. But as I have gained experience I have found that a verb used as a coupling verb(as in your example) can still be placed as the last word in a sentence making it look like, as an example,the perfect passive form “amatus sum”. The book which I am using has this mania of putting the verb at the end of a sentence even when beyond any doubt the verb is a coupling verb.
I must stress that the word order does not determine the meaning. Heri vir mortuus est and Heri vir est mortuus both should be interpreted as a compound verb: “Yesterday the man died” And likewise predicate adjectives can come before or after the copulative: vir est iratus or vir iratus est. I don’t know why, but to me the latter feels more natural with the verb at the end, even with the copulative. I don’t know what the statistics are, but there isn’t a rule that says compound verbs must be contructed mortuus est and copulatives as est mortuus.