Predication with _beautiful of face_

[Yehuda N. Falk]

I haven't seen the Kuhn stuff, so I can't comment on the representation of
"the baby is partially blue". But I'm not sure that this is analogous. I
don't think we would say that a giraffe is partially long, or that someone
with blue eyes is partially blue. (And I find "blue of face" ungrammatical,
as does a non-linguist I just asked.) The closest colloquial construction
for, say, "long of neck" would be "long-necked". So even for English, it
seems unlikely to me that we would want to say that the adjective itself is
predicated of the SUBJ.

--Yehuda


>Maybe I'm being obtuse about languages that I don't know, but about
>English I'm thinking this way:
>
>if a baby is partially blue, it is not blue, but it is blue in some
>parts (the face).  How do we represent "the baby is partially blue" in
>f-structure?  Maybe:
>
>      [ SUBJ [ "baby"]
>        PRED [ REL "blue"
>               MOD [ "partially" ]
>              ]
>       ]
>
>Here I'm treating the PRED as having a AVM value consisting of
>RELation (or FN), ARGuments, and MODifying restrictors (as some LFG
>formalizations, e.g. Kuhn's in his recent book).
>
>This could be the way that "blue of face", "long of neck" are
>construed, couldn't it?  The MOD of the PRED would describe the
>relevant parts that restrict the adjectival property.
>
>Joan