Our aim is to analyse two predicative structures in French, namely the well-known Tough-Construction (TC, e.g. la voiture est agréable à conduire ‘the car is pleasant to drive’) and the lesser studied ‘Restrictive Partitive Construction’ (RPC, e.g. cet enfant est vif d’esprit ‘this child is quick-witted’). Drawing on traditional descriptions of Semitic languages, we argue that both constructions instantiate a type of ‘indirect predication’, known as naʿt sababī in the literature on Modern Standard Arabic. Evidence comes from (i) semantic correspondences between the adjectives, verbs and nouns that can appear in the relevant structures, and (ii) the semantics of the element that appears to the right of the adjective (its ontological status, and its role in semantically restricting the adjective). Turning to the syntax of French TCs and RPCs, we offer an analysis couched in the framework of den Dikken (2006), focusing on (i) the syntactic status of à and de (complementizer or linker?), (ii) and on the internal structure of the complex predicate formed by the adjective and its complement. As to the latter point, we propose that the two constructions involve two distinct types of predicate inversion.