Noncompositional

I’ve been thinking a lot about scales lately: scales that come packaged with gradable adjectives, those that are pragmatically constructed, the ones that tell you that you weigh too much. This morning I was thinking about a particular construction that talks about (for lack of a better term) sufficiency with respect to scales. The basic form is [A as N is, X], where A is an adjective (phrase), N is a noun (phrase), and X is some clause.

• Rich as she is, she can buy anything he wants.
• Rich as she is, she still probably couldn’t afford a house in this part of town
• Short as he is, he could still pass for a child / he could use his student ID card for the rest of his life.
• Short as he is, he would never pass for an elementary school student.

Call the first of each pair the “positive” or “enabling” version. Call the second of each pair the “insufficient” version. It’s my intuition that the positive version needs heavy stress on the pronoun (that is, the N element). The intonation can then fall sharply after the N, or could remain steady. On the other hand, the insufficient readings require heavy stress on the “is,” with steadily falling intonation throughout the entire first part of the construction. A friend of mine shares these intuitions. However, I asked a couple of other people, who couldn’t get the enabling readings at all, despite any intonational differences (I even asked if they could figure out how to say it so that the enabling reading would be possible, but they said it was just unsayable). But then I asked someone else who said that either reading was possible, but only one intonational pattern was possible. This person wanted the stress to appear on the “is,” but could get either the enabling or the insufficient readings. So I’m not sure what’s up with these intuitions.

Now, I admit that the enabling readings are in general hard to get. It seems easier with some (like rich) than more complicated ones, like firmly rooted in the ground as these trees are, they’ll probably survive the next earthquake are almost too ridiculously long. I don’t suppose anyone out there has any intuitions regarding this.

There are also some interesting data here that reflect the orientation and neutrality of gradable adjectives. But I’d have to draw myself some pictures to make sense of it, and I’m too tired for that.