The following sections present various aspects of constructions involving modification:

Litotes is a figure of speech, by which a positive property is expressed by the negation of its antonym, which normally denotes a negatively valued property. This means that the negative property is reversed, resulting in a positive statement. An example is given below:

The phenomenon is also found with other syntactic categories. Below is an example with a PP:

Here the negative Preposition and negation yields an interpretation in which the two negations cancel each other. Nevertheless, (2) is not equivalent to (3):

Thus the workings of negation in natural language are quite subtle. In the example above, the sentential negation also interacts with the modal verbs, which may explain the difference in meaning between the last two sentences.

An adjective, once used in an AP, can anaphorically be pronominalised. An example is given below:

The pronoun dät ‘that’ is generally used to pronominalise various impersonal syntactic categories.

An AP may be used in an exclamative expression to express a high degree interpretation. Exclamatives are often introduced by interrogative pronouns such as wät ‘what’ and wo ‘how’. Wo ‘how’ is used with adjectives that are not used attributively. An example is given below:

Wo ‘how’ must be adjacent to the AP which it modifies. Wät ‘what’, in contrast, needs not be not adjacent to the AP which it modifies. As a result, it can be more generally used, for example, to modify attributive adjectives. An example is given below:

Here the interrogative word at the beginning of the clause is responsible for a high degree interpretation of the attributively used adjective embedded in the object NP.

A very similar construction is minimally different in suggesting an interpretation asking after a kind of objects instead of the objects themselves. An example is given below:

Here the exclamative interrogative is separated from the NP, or more specifically from the AP, which it modifies. However, they may also be found together at the beginning of the clause. The construction features the adposition foar ‘for’, preceding the NP containing the AP that is modified by the exclamative question word. The NP inside PP is a plural indefinite that is not accompanied by determiners, numerals or quantifiers, presumably because of its kind interpretation.

Finally, this exclamative can also be used with predicative adjectives:

The interrogative pronoun is again separated from the AP which it modifies.