2002 Volume 19 Issue 2 Pages 113-141
Expressions like an angel of a girl show syntax-semantics mismatches; the first noun heads the phrase syntactically but not semantically. It also exhibits adjectival properties. Such properties of this type of expression are accounted for without problems pertaining to syntactic and lexical analyses, if the expression is treated as a constructional idiom, called here the adjectival noun construction, and if lexical licensing, instead of lexical insertion, is adopted. This is only possible under a correspondence view such as the one adopted in the tripartite parallel architecture model of grammar, which admits the autonomy of semantics as well as that of syntax.
