The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

272 The syntax of early English(55) pouerte wi menske is ea for to olienpoverty with honour is easy for to endure‘poverty with honour is easy to endure’ (Wooing Lord 279.12)(56) oer namys . . . the which bynother names the which areherdur to vndurstondeharder to understand‘other names, which are harder to understand’ (Bokenham MAngl. 16/15)But around 1400, examples of the ‘easy-to-please’ construction start appearingwhich have preposition stranding just like present-day English (2) and (3).Two examples are given in (57) and (58). Note that in (57), hit is a referentialpronoun rather than a dummy element.(57) ei fondu hit igood and esythey found ith igood and easyto dele wi t ialsoto deal with also‘they found it good and also easy to deal with.’(Cursor Mundi (Trinity & Laud MSS) 16557)(58) e gospel i. . . is . . . most esithe gospel i...is ...most easyto wynne heuene by t ito gain heaven by‘the gospel is easiest to gain heaven by’ (Wyclif Leaven Pharisees 2.22)Altogether, we have so far found six Middle English examples of ‘easy-toplease’with preposition stranding, all from fifteenth-century manuscripts, andmany more from later centuries. Since no examples at all have been found fromany of the preceding centuries, it seems safe to conclude – in spite of theundoubted incompleteness of all the data from the Old and Middle Englishperiods – that both (57) and (58) are innovations that first became possible atsome time in the late Middle English period. The robustness of the fifteenthcenturyevidence for preposition stranding (six tokens among a total of somefifty instances of ‘easy-to-please’ that we have collected so far) thus supportsthe line of reasoning pursued in the previous section, where we argued thatthere was a sufficient number of ‘easy-to-please’ instances in Old English (andalso early Middle English) for preposition stranding cases to be attested if theywere possible at all.The theoretical significance of the occurrence of preposition stranding inthe ‘easy-to-please’ construction is of course that it can be used as a diagnosticfor determining whether the construction instantiates wh-movement orNP-movement. However, this diagnostic cannot be applied in precisely the