Dick:
> And:
> > die of fright
> > die from fright
> >
> >Here it seems to me that both mean that the dying is caused by fright.
> >So no direct relation between dying and fright.
> ## Eh? Isn't causation a direct relation?
Well, you could say "kisser" is a direct relation: "John is Mary's
kisser" = "John kissed Mary". So I'm not sure how robust the notion
'direct relation' is. So instead I should say that fright is not
an argument of dying; rather, the relation between them is given
by 'from'/'of'. Returning to 'afraid of', it seems to be a general
rule that since adjectives can't take nominal complements, they
instead have to have recourse to prepositional complements that
specify (or are semantically consistent with) the semantic relation
between adjective and noun.
--And.
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