The Category P Features, Projections, Interpretation

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be closed (or satisfied) syntactically (i.e. not necessarily thematically) by a subject. 49
If an A has an additional (internal) argument slot, it is closed internally (Rothstein
1991). When functioning as modifiers, the external slot of an AP is proposed to be
satisfied through identification with the external slot of the modified nominal,
accompanied by assignment of a certain semantic role (the role of an attribute) to the
modified argument (referred to as autonymous theta-marking in Higginbotham 1985).
As part of their lexical properties, adjectives determine whether the argument
they modify/are predicated of is a simple, individual denoting argument (e.g. It is a
blue table/The table is blue) or a more complex, event denoting argument (e.g. It is
easy/important to read this book/To read this book is easy/important). 50
Given this, it is plausible to attribute the ungrammaticality of (71b) to the
incompatibility of the tough A with individual denoting nominals. The distribution of
the tough A illustrated in (73) supports this direction. Putting aside for a moment the
TC (73e), (73) shows that the tough A is predicated of event denoting arguments,
namely CPs (73a,b) and event denoting DPs (73c), but not individual denoting DPs
(73d):
(73) a. (ze) kaše [ CP likro et ha-sefer] non-TC
(it) difficult to+read Acc the-book
“It is difficult to read the book.”
b. [ CP likro et ha-sefer] ze kaše 51 non-TC
to+read Acc the-book it difficult
“To read the book is difficult.”
c. [ DP kri’at ha-sefer] kaša non-TC
reading the-book difficult
“Reading the book is difficult.”
d. *ha-dira kaša
the-apartment [is] difficult
49 I use the term closed/satisfied, rather than saturated, in order to distinguish closure of an argument
slot of a predicate from semantic (existential or arbitrary) saturation of a suppressed argument.
50 Strictly speaking, the relation between the AP and the CP in It is easy/important to read this book is
not that of modification. For one, when an AP functions as a modifier it is part of the phrase projected
by the modifiee (i.e. a blue table is a nominal rather than an adjectival phrase). Whether the relation
between the adjective and the CP is a theta-relation, or another kind of semantic relation (cf. Grimshaw
1990) is not crucial for the present discussion. In what follows I will refer to it as internal predication.
51 The occurrence of the pronoun ze (‘it’) following the CP in (73b) is surprising. For a promising
analysis, see Hazout (1994).