Predication with _beautiful of face_

[Joan Bresnan]

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


Yehuda Falk wrote:

>The Hebrew construction has the adjective in construct state form, and
then
the noun.

(1)  a.  ha-jirafa      hi arukat        cavar.
          the-giraffe(F) is long.F.CONSTR neck
          'The giraffe is long of neck.'

      b.  ha- tinok   haya kxol          eynayim.
          the-baby(M) was  blue.M.CONSTR eyes
          'The baby was blue of eye.'

The adjective agrees with the subject, even though it describes the
post-adjective noun. I don't think we want to say that the adjective
'long'
or 'blue' is predicated of the subject.