Like Craig, I think this kind of construction really acts on its own
terms, as a kind of schema. If I try to fit it into a more traditional
analysis, though, I find myself having to set up a distinction between
these two:

That recipe is hard to make.
That recipe is too hard to make.

In the first, "to make" appears to be directly modifying "hard," but
there's a sense in which in the second, it's modifying "too hard" --
it's pinning down its overdifficulty, not its difficulty. The
modification occurs at one level up the expansion ladder. While I don't
agree with some of the totalizing generalizations in X-bar accounts of
phrase structure (e.g., *all* phrases are endocentric, *all* phrases
have exactly three levels of expansion), it does provide a useful way of
talking about this kind of thing. 

Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University

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