The Category P Features, Projections, Interpretation

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c. basar adom hu mazon (*ha-/*še-) ta’im/kaše le-ikul
meat red he food (the-/that-) tasty/difficult to-digestion
“Red meat is a tasty food/difficult food to digest.”
Compare:
d. basar adom hu mazon *(ha-/še-) mit’akel le’at
meat red he food (the-/that-) [gets] digested slowly
“Red meat is food that is digested slowly.”
.
Given the above, the tough A is definitely the head of the complex predicate.
The question arises as to what is the syntactic position of the le NP/PP with respect to
the tough A. Recall that the le NP/PP is predicative and therefore is not assigned a
theta-role by the tough A, but rather is modified by it. Therefore it seems
unreasonable to assume that the le NP/PP is the complement of A. 59 Syntactically,
modification is represented as adjunction. In the usual cases, the modifier is adjoined
to some projection of the modifiee. I suggest that in the TC it is the other way around:
The modifiee ( le NP/PP) is adjoined to a projection of the tough modifier, as in (92): 60
(92) AP Ext
A’
A’ leNP/PP (e i , Ext)
A
(ext. slot, Int i )
To summarize, in the TC the tough A and the le NP/PP form a complex AP
predicate. As the result, the externalized argument of the predicative constituent
59 This situation is unique to the TC. In non-TCs (i), the event denoting argument (CP) is arguably
licensed as the internal argument of the tough A:
(i) ze kal [ CP likro et ha-sefer]
It [is] easy to read the book.
60 The mismatch between the semantic function and the syntactic representation might be one of the
reasons for the relatively late acquisition of this construction in English (around 6-8 years) (Debbie
Anderson p.c.).