Section 28.5.2 has argued that some adjectives can take a clause or a PP as their logical subject, provided they are accompanied by the anticipatory pronoun het. Two examples are repeated here as (321b) and (321c).

This might lead to the expectation that we can also find adjectival subjects. However, the examples in (322) show that constructions comparable to (321c) do not occur with adjectives; cf. the unacceptability of (322c).

This is surprising, because there seems to be no general prohibition against adjectival subjects. The examples in (323) show that they do occasionally occur in copular and vinden-constructions, but then the anticipatory pronoun het cannot be used: it is the AP itself that occupies the subject position.

One might object to the assumption that the logical subjects in (323) are real adjectives by postulating that we are dealing with disguised noun phrases. For example, we might assume that the adjectives in the (a)-examples of (323) are shorthand forms for the complex noun phrases in (324).

A problem with this suggestion, however, is that there is no obvious paraphrase available for the other examples. Furthermore, comparatives can also occupy the subject position, as in (325), and again paraphrases of the type in (324) are not available.

Although the syntactic properties of the constructions in (323) have not yet been thoroughly investigated, it seems clear that they have a very limited distribution. Semantically, the adjective functions as a second-order predicate, i.e. it denotes a property that is predicated not of entities but of properties of entities; cf. Section 30.5 for a discussion of adverbially used adjectives with a similar second-order property.