The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

266 The syntax of early Englishposition; it only has an empty subject position, for which the interpretation isprovided by the subject of the adjective. An example of this Old English‘eager-to-please’ construction is (40).(40) æt u swie geornfull wære hit to gehyrannethat you very eager were it to hear‘that you were very eager to hear it’ (Bo 22.51.6)Here, the element u, which functions as the subject of the adjective, is alsothe understood subject of the infinitival clause hit to gehyranne, which has nonon-subject gap.A third class of adjectives that can be followed by an infinitival clause consistsof words meaning ‘pleasant’, ‘pretty’, ‘beautiful’ and the like; we shalllabel them the pretty-class. Examples are given in (41) and (42).(41) his song & his leo wæron swa wynsumu to gehyrannehis song and his poem were so pleasant to hear‘his song and his poem were so pleasant to hear’ (Bede 4.25.346.3)(42) Wæs seo wunung ær swye wynsum on to wicennewas the dwelling-place there very pleasant in to live‘The dwelling-place there was very pleasant to live in’ (LS8 (Eust) 315)At first sight, the construction in (41) looks just like the ‘easy-to-please’construction, except that the meaning of the adjective is slightly different.However, as (42) shows, pretty-adjectives differ from the easy-class in beingattested in a pattern with preposition stranding. A further difference is thatpretty-adjectives do not occur in either the ‘it’-type or the zero-type, i.e. patterns(39b) and (39c), even though these patterns are much more frequent inOld English than pattern (39a). There is also a semantic difference, in thatpretty-adjectives can be said to describe directly the referent of their NPsubject, i.e. they theta-mark the subject, while easy-adjectives are alwaysamenable to an interpretation in which they describe or characterize an action,rather than the referent of a NP, with the resultant problems for determiningtheir thematic structure noted in section 8.2. For the distinction between thetwo types of adjectives in present-day English, see Lasnik and Fiengo (1974).Having seen that preposition stranding in the adjective–infinitive pattern isattested in Old English, we can now return to the question whether perhapsthis pattern was also possible with easy-adjectives, but happened not to getwritten down in any of the surviving texts. How to decide this? One relevantobservation here may be that of the total of 286 Old English examples featuringan adjective plus an infinitive clause with a non-subject gap, thirtysevenhave preposition stranding as in example (42). If we take this proportionto be the rate at which the adjective–infinitive construction might show