The following is a study of the syntax and semantics of two attributive adjective constructions of English. Alongside the goal of providing a thorough description of their structure and interpretation, I devote particular attention to the constructions' significance for theories of gradability and modal comparison; they also offer new insight into the division of labor between semantics and pragmatics in determining standards of comparison for gradable predicates in the positive degree. The constructions in question involve interactions between an attributive adjective and a postnominal infinitival relative clause within a (typically predicative) DP. I call them attributive-with-infinitive constructions (AICs). AICs are divided into nominal and clausal subtypes; the classification of examples relies heavily on their interpretation, as nominal and clausal AICs share the same surface syntax. An example of a nominal AIC is Middlemarch is a long book to assign; a minimally different clausal AIC is Middlemarch is a bad book to assign. This work is, to the best of my knowledge, the first to provide a thorough description and analysis of nominal AICs.

Nominal AICs are associated with an interpretation of inappropriateness: in the example above, we understand that Middlemarch is inappropriately long for the purpose of assigning it. I propose that this reading arises from the way in which the standard of comparison for positives is computed: the standard is partly a product of the future-oriented modality of the infinitival relative clause. The positive degree operator tells us that Middlemarch 's length exceeds this modalized standard of comparison; inappropriateness is the result. Clausal AICs, by contrast, are related to the tough construction and may be paraphrased via an impersonal: It is bad/#long to assign Middlemarch. I argue that a clausal-AIC adjective specifies a modal ordering source against which the content of the infinitival relative is evaluated. For the example above, the resulting interpretation is that the proposition one assigns Middlemarch is more compatible with the ideal specified by good than other propositions of the form one assigns x. The two types of AIC are thus both comparison constructions; their semantic differences are paralleled by differences in syntactic structure and composition.