The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

262 The syntax of early Englishcorrect descriptive generalizations about the construction in the grammarof Old English, and to propose a structural analysis incorporating thesegeneralizations.Among the 286 attested Old English examples with an adjective combinedwith an infinitival clause which has a non-subject gap, there are 46 that featurean adjective with the meaning ‘easy’, ‘hard’ or ‘difficult’. A complete list, withthe number of attestations in the ‘easy-to-please’ construction, is given in (25)and three example sentences are provided in (26)–(28).(25) adjective ‘easy-to-please’ tokensearfo 15earfolic 3eae 12uneae 4eaelic 5hefig 2hefigtyme 3leoht 2(26) æt him wære eaelic se wifhired to healdannethat him was easy the nunnery to hold& to rihtanneand to rule‘that the nunnery was easy for him to lead and to rule’ (GD 1(C) 4.27.4)(27) is me-for is hefi to donnethis for-me is hard to do‘this is hard for me to do’(Mart 5(Kotzor) 2035[SE 16/A/14])(28) ælc ehtnys bi earfoe toolienneeach persecution is hard to endure‘every persecution is hard to endure’ (ÆCHom II, 42.313.110)A comparison with Mair (1987), an empirical study of the construction in themodern Survey of English Usage corpus, shows that ‘easy-to-please’ is aboutthree times more frequent in present-day English than in Old English (onetoken per 15,000 words in the modern material, one token per 50,000 wordsin the Old English material). Judging by the available data, the constructionalso appears to be grammatically more restricted in Old English than inpresent-day English: the gap in the infinitival clause in (26)–(28), and also inthe other forty-three Old English examples of the construction, functions asthe object of a verb (healdan, rihtan, don, olian) that would assign accusativecase to an overt NP object. As already noted in Allen (1980: 383 n.25), thereare no attested examples like (2), (3) or (4), with preposition stranding in the‘easy-to-please’ construction, in Old English.