Hijacked Predicate Raising in an AAE Attributive Construction

This construction consists minimally of two parts: an adjective (e.g., dumb, crazy) or a noun (e.g., fool, punk) and the word ass; these two parts together serve to modify a noun, as shown in (1), where dumb ass modifies husband. Because of the attributive modificational nature of this construction, I will call it the Ass Attributive Construction (AAC). Because the construction admits some alternatives to the word ass (e.g., behind, butt), as I will discuss further below, I will refer to this component of the construction as the a-word. My analysis of this construction involves a combination of the raising of a predicate and movement into the extended projection of an a-word (movements which I call hijacking), followed by a continuation of predicate raising, this time by the modifier and a-word constituent, into attributive (prenominal) position. This analysis thus relies on a reduced relative clause analysis of attributive adjectives (cf. Smith 1961, Kayne 1994, Alexiadou 2001, Leu 2008) and sidewards movement into a camouflage construction (cf. Nunes 1995, Bobaljik and Brown 1997, Nunes 2001, Collins 2007a, Roehrs 2007). A special case of the AAC consists of a determiner and adjective or noun, plus the aword, as exemplified in (2).