Evaluative Adjectives: An Adjunct Control Analysis

Evaluative adjectives like stupid, smart, silly, and rude have been recognized as a coherent syntactic and semantic class for over forty years (Lees 1960, Bolinger 1961, Vendler 1963, 1968, Quirk et al. 1985). The class has gained recent attention, however, from syntacticians looking to extend analyses of argument alignment in the verbal domain to the adjectival domain (Stowell 1991, Bennis 2000, 2004, Landau 2006) and from semanticists examining the interpretation of ‘vague’ predicates (Barker 2002, inter alia). The majority of these analyses make a starting assumption that the embedded infinitival in an evaluative control structure like (1) is an optional thematic argument of the adjective.