The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

The history of the ‘easy-to-please’ construction 261role of agent assigned by (have) eaten). In (24), there is therefore movementfrom a theta-position to a non-theta-position, creating a chain with one thetarole,which is fine. But if in (5) John is base-generated as matrix subject, wheredoes it get its theta-role from? The possibility of having dummy it as subject,as in (22), suggests that easy (to convince) does not theta-mark its subject.At the present stage, some scholars maintain that in (5) the adjective doestheta-mark its subject position (see for example Bennis 1990, Wilder 1991).This of course leaves us with the question why in (5) the predicate assigns atheta-role, while in (22) it does not. Other scholars assume that the pair (5) and(22) should, as far as possible, be dealt with in the same way as the pair (23)and (24). This means that, for (5), they have to appeal to some special mechanismto combine or join the wh-chain (OP i,t i) with the main clause subjectJohn, in order to provide John with a theta-role (for specific proposals, seeChomsky 1981: 308–10, Browning 1987, Foldvik 1989 and Massam 1992).These then are some of the issues and considerations that have informed the(generative) discussion about the structure of the ‘easy-to-please’ construction.As we shall see in the following sections, the same kinds of considerations againplay a role when it comes to determining the structure of the ‘easy-to-please’construction and related phenomena as they existed in Old and Middle English.8.3 Data and analysis for Old EnglishSince the ‘easy-to-please’ construction is much less frequent thansome of the constructions discussed in the preceding chapters, we need totread carefully in making descriptive generalizations about it. It is thereforenecessary to devote some special attention here to empirical matters (thoughthis is of course nothing unusual in dealing with historical data, as thegeneral remarks in 1.3 and the case studies in the earlier chapters will havemade abundantly clear). The material to be discussed in this section is drawnfrom van der Wurff (1992a), which reports on the results of a search throughthe Old English microfiche concordance of Healey and Venezky (1980) forcombinations of an adjective with an infinitival clause. Since this concordancecontains all Old English texts that have survived, and since the searchthrough it was designed to be exhaustive, we can be fairly confident that whatwe are looking at is all that there is to look at in the way of Old English ‘easyto-please’examples. 4 The problem is to draw from the limited material the4Earlier collections of data can be found in Callaway (1913), van der Gaaf (1928) andVisser (1963–73: §§ 940, 1388). The empirical investigation carried out in van derWurff (1992a) was explicitly designed to supersede these rather spotty collections.