Predication with _beautiful of face_

[Frederick Hoyt]

Hi,

I'm wondering if anyone in the LFG community has considered or could
reflect upon constructions like the following (these are all examples I
pulled off the web):

	"Dietrich was slender of body and of medium height "
	"She is slender of build and graceful in movement
	"She remembered when she was round of belly, ripe tropical as a
setting moon"
	"The fact is simple: Bush is weak. He is weak of mind. He is not very
smart. He is weak of body "

and so on.

The issue is how the predication between the subject in such an example
and the predicate would be represented. Intuitively, saying that "Bush
is weak of mind" is equivalent (at least truth-conditionally) to saying
that "Bush's mind is weak" or "Bush has a weak mind." In other words,
"weak" seems like it should be predicated of "mind," rather than Bush.
In LFG terms, this should mean that _weak_ subcategorizes for a (SUBJ)
function, and that _mind_ should fill it, or that it is an adjunct
modifying _mind_.

However, if I assume that a predicational clause is represented as a
functional control structure, then I would expect - at least in
syntactic terms - that _weak_ should be predicated of Bush. Say that
_be_ is a raising verb, and _weak of mind_ is its XCOMP. Then  _Bush_
should fill the SUBJ-function in the PRED-function of  _weak_.  But if
that is the case, then it's not clear to me what role _of mind_ is
playing.

I would say that in English, examples like this have a slightly bookish
feel, so maybe they're a marginal phenomenon, but in other languages
(such as Standard Arabic) they are very productive, and considered good
style, so even if an analysis might be of marginal concern for English,
it would be very useful elsewhere.

Thanks for any thoughts,

Fred Hoyt


Frederick M. Hoyt
Linguistics Department
University of Texas at Austin
fmhoyt at mail.utexas.edu
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