Adjectivally headed construct states and the semantics of metonymic predication

Abstract

Adjectivally-headed construct states such as (i) pose a problem for thematic role assignment, and for accounts of compositional semantic interpretation.(i)ha-yeledšxoreynayimDEF-boy.m.sgblack.m.sgeyes.f.pl“the boy has black eyes”Apparently, the external thematic role of the adjective šxor, is assigned to its complement, while it is not clear what thematic role is assigned to external argument of the whole phrase. Siloni (2002) and Hazout (2000) suggest that these constructions are inalienable possession constructions: the complement noun is a noun of inalienable possession and thus relational, and its external argument becomes the argument of the whole phrase. I argue that these are indeed inalienable possession constructions, but that the crucial relation is expressed by the adjectival head and not by the nominal complement: the adjectival construct state in (i) predicates of its subject the property “being black with respect to his eyes”. These constructions illustrate what I shall call “metonymic predication”, in which a property is predicated of an entity x in virtue of a relation that holds between x and a proper part of x. This allows us to give a simple syntactic analysis of these expressions and a straightforward compositional semantic analysis.