Section 6.6 has shown that locational and directional PPs can be used as the subjects of predicatively used adjectives, provided that they are accompanied by the anticipatory pronoun het. A similar option does not exist for adjectives, as can be readily observed from the examples in (290), which contrast minimally with the examples in (277) via replacement of the PP in Amsterdam by the qualifying APs comfortabel'comfortable' and mooi'beautiful'. The examples in (290b&c) show that constructions comparable to (277b) do, but constructions comparable to (277c) do not arise.

Still, adjectives can occasionally take an AP as their subject in the copular and vinden-constructions, but then the anticipatory pronoun het can not occur: it is the AP itself that occupies the subject position, as is illustrated in (291).

      One might object to the assumption that the subjects in (291) are real adjectives by saying that we are dealing with concealed noun phrases. For example, we could assume that the adjectives in (a)-examples of (291) are shorthand forms for the complex noun phrases in (292).

However, a problem for this suggestion is that no obvious paraphrase is available for the other examples. Further, comparatives can also occupy the subject position, as in (293), and paraphrases of the type in (292) are again not available in that case.

      Although the syntactic properties of the constructions in (291) have not been seriously investigated so far, it seems that they have a very limited distribution. Semantically, the predicative adjective functions as a second order predicate, that is, it denotes a property that is not predicated of entities but of properties of entities; see Section 8.3 for a discussion of adverbially used adjectives that have a similar second order property.