I investigate the syntax and semantics of a previously unexamined English adjective construction, exemplified by sentences like Middlemarch is a long book to assign. The construction, which I call the nominal attributive-with-infinitive construction (nominal AIC), is of interest for the semantics of gradability and modality. I argue that the major interpretive characteristic of the nominal AIC – the interpretation of inappropriateness associated with it – arises from the interaction between the positive degree operator associated with the gradable adjective and the modality of the infinitival relative clause, which contributes to the computation of the standard of comparison. Nominal AICs are compared and contrasted with a surface-identical construction I call the clausal AIC, with attributive too, and with attributive comparatives; they are shown to exhibit major syntactic and semantic differences from all of these. The paper serves both as a contribution to the semantic literature on gradability and as a contribution to the descriptive grammar of English, as it is, to the best of my knowledge, the first systematic description and analysis of the nominal AIC.

We know a great deal about the Indo-European language family, and we can reconstruct a significant part of its vocabulary and its meaning-structure. Some words are virtual certainties, e.g. the form and meaning of the number ‘seven’, as well as other numerals. Other words are quite beyond confident recovery, both for form and for the notion itself, e.g. ‘good’. As a rule, we may say that in proportion as the lexeme is bound up with semantics that are or have been culturally relative the reconstruction becomes increasingly elusive.

This article deals with the relation between subcategorization and the notion head in OE [P-V] compounds. Many morphosyntactic properties such as category and morphological class percolate from the head to the mother. Subcategorization, however, can percolate to the mother from a nonhead as well as from the head. This is evident from the comparison of their case government properties. This paper shows that the process of ARGUMENT ATTRACTION developed within Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar permits a straightforward account of this phenomenon.