The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

The history of the ‘easy-to-please’ construction 267preposition stranding in Old English texts, the forty-six examples with aneasy-adjective could be expected to yield five or six tokens with prepositionstranding. But they yield none.Secondly, data from modern English corpora can be used to strengthen thisargument. Mair (1987) discusses the ‘easy-to-please’ construction in theSurvey of English Usage corpus. Although he does not give figures for the frequencyof cases with preposition stranding, inspection of the example sentencesthat he cites in the course of his article shows that five of them havepreposition stranding, which means that they represent at least six per cent ofthe ‘easy-to-please’ tokens found by Mair. We have obtained roughly similarresults in an exploratory examination of the written Brown andLondon–Oslo–Bergen (LOB) corpora: the proportion of ‘easy-to-please’tokens with preposition stranding in both corpora is nine per cent. Assuminga frequency of roughly the same magnitude in Old English, this would meanthat we might expect four or five such tokens in the Old English material, providedthat this option existed in the first place.Thirdly, although there has been no exhaustive empirical work on the ‘easyto-please’construction in early Middle English, examination of the lists ofexamples of the construction given in van der Gaaf (1928), Visser (1963–73:§§ 940, 1388) and the Middle English Dictionary, complemented by cursoryreading of a large number of early Middle English texts, has thrown up manyexamples of ‘easy-to-please’ from this period, but none with prepositionstranding. It is only in texts written down around 1400 that such examples arefirst found (see section 8.4 for further details).On the basis of these considerations, we are led to believe that the patternin (36) provides the correct generalization about the ‘easy-to-please’ constructionin Old English, and that the type with preposition stranding, as in this iseasy to deal with, was not possible at that time. In chapters 2 and 3, it was notedthat Old English did not have preposition stranding in several constructionsand sentence types which acquired this possibility during the Middle Englishperiod. If the reasoning above is correct, as we shall assume in what follows,‘easy-to-please’ is one more of these constructions.Let us now turn to the question of how the Old English ‘easy-to-please’construction ought to be analysed. What we shall argue is basically that theinfinitive in this construction has properties usually associated with passives,an idea first developed in the generative framework by van der Wurff (1987,1990a), from earlier hints by Callaway and Jespersen. 6 An important clue to6A similar analysis is assumed in Kageyama (1992) and Demske-Neumann (1994:85–100).