The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

The history of the ‘easy-to-please’ construction 271moves via the subject position of the infinitival clause to the matrix subjectposition, where it receives nominative case. The passive character of the verbto olienne in (51) can be attributed to absorption, by the infinitival morphology,of the subject theta-role and the case that it would normally assign, in amanner often postulated for regular passives (see 8.2). 7We have seen that pretty-adjectives in Old English are different from easyadjectivesin that they can be followed by an infinitival clause with a gap eitherin direct object position or in the complement of a preposition, as shown byexamples like (41) and (42). This distributional fact makes the pretty-constructionsimilar to Old English instances of wh-movement since – providedthe wh-element is non-overt (see 2.6) – these can result in clauses with anempty object or an empty complement inside a prepositional phrase.Examples of relative clauses with the two patterns are given in (52) and (53);for further details, see 2.5.1.(52) æs yfeles e he worhteof-the evil that he did‘of the evil that he did’ (CP 25.2)(53) a upahefednysse e he urh ahreasthe presumption that he through fell‘the presumption because of which he fell’ (ÆCHom I, 13.192.17)On the basis of this similarity, we can analyse the pretty-construction in OldEnglish as an instance of wh-movement, as first suggested in van Kemenade(1987). For a sentence like (42), a structure as in (54) may therefore beassumed, with OP again standing for an empty operator that has moved to thespecifier position of the infinitival CP.(54) Wæs seo wunung . . . wynsum [ CPOP i[ IPPRO on t ito wicenne]]In Middle English, the pretty-construction continues without change. The‘easy-to-please’ construction, however, undergoes several changes, to whichwe now turn.8.4 Data and analysis for Middle EnglishThroughout the Middle English period, the simple type of ‘easy-toplease’,featuring an empty object in the infinitival clause, continues to beattested, as illustrated in (55) and (56).7In Kageyama (1992), a different proposal is put forward for the nature of the absorptionprocess in the Old English to-infinitive; see 7.1 for an evaluation.