The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

The history of the ‘easy-to-please’ construction 257a subject followed by a predicate formed by an adjective plus an infinitivalclause with a non-subject gap. The interpretation of this gap is provided by thesubject.Although this construction as such is attested from the Old English periodto the present day, two major changes in its surface manifestations can betraced over the centuries. One of these changes concerns the status of the nonsubjectgap in the infinitival clause, and its exact relation to the subject NP (aswe shall see, this can be interpreted as reflecting a change in the nature of themovement processes operative in the construction) and the second changeconcerns the form of the infinitive in the subordinate clause (active, as in(1)–(4), or passive, which is no longer allowed in present-day English but wasin earlier English).After presenting the empirical data showing these different changes, weshall discuss in detail the appropriate analysis for the data and the possiblereasons for the changes that they manifest, emphasizing their relation withother syntactic changes in English. As a preliminary to these historicalmatters, we will begin by briefly reviewing some of the basic issues which loomlarge in theoretical analyses of the construction in present-day English andwhich will also inform our discussion of the historical data.8.2 Theoretical issues in the analysis of ‘easy-to-please’In the generative literature on ‘easy-to-please’ in present-day English,the general view is that the construction instantiates wh-movement (or, to usethe more general term, A-bar movement). That is, it is assumed that the sentencein (1) has a basic structure as in (5).(5) John iwas [ APeasy [ CPOP i[ IPPRO to convince t i]]]The adjective easy takes a clausal CP complement with a specifier positionfilled by the empty operator OP, which can be regarded as the non-overtcounterpart to an overt wh-phrase. OP has moved to the specifier of CPfrom the object position inside the embedded IP, leaving a trace; a furthermechanism ensures that the matrix subject NP John is interpreted as supplyingthe referential value of the operator, expressed in (5) by coindexationof the two elements. The subject position of the embedded infinitival clauseis filled by the non-overt pronoun PRO, which in this case has an arbitraryinterpretation.Various distributional arguments for assuming a structure as in (5) havebeen put forward by Chomsky (1977), who first proposed the wh-analysis of