Starting Fall 2008:
Assistant Professor of Linguistics
Department of English
Wayne State University

E-mail:
fleisher at berkeley dot edu

Professional Interests:
Semantics, syntax, language change, Slavic

Dissertation:
Adjectives and infinitives in composition; University of California, Berkeley, 2008

Committee in charge: Chris Barker, Andrew Garrett, Line Mikkelsen (chair), Alan Timberlake

In the dissertation, I examine two surface-identical attributive-adjective constructions of English, exemplified by the sentences That is a long book to assign and That is a bad book to assign. I call these sentence types attributive-with-infinitive constructions, or AICs; those of the long type are nominal AICs, while those of the bad type are clausal AICs. The two types are distinguished by, among other things, the acceptability of an impersonal paraphrase: It is #long/bad to assign that book. Nominal AICs—which have not been extensively analyzed before—are of interest for the semantics of gradability; in particular, they show that it is possible for overt linguistic material to override the default standard of comparison for a subset of so-called "absolute" gradable adjectives in the positive degree. Clausal AICs are of interest for the study of modal gradability; I claim that a clausal-AIC adjective specifies a modal ordering source, in the sense of Kratzer. Clausal AICs are likewise of interest for the ways in which they differ from the otherwise apparently closely related tough construction.