The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

274 The syntax of early EnglishThis then would provide us with a simple and unified analysis for each of thefollowing constructions in Middle English: ordinary passives, modal passivesand ‘easy-to-please’ constructions. They would share the configuration in (65),in which the subject NP has undergone NP-movement from the positionmarked with a trace and there is Case absorption by the participial orinfinitival morphology.(65) NP ibe (ADJ) V part/inf(P) t iHowever, this cannot be the whole story for the ‘easy-to-please’ construction.An analysis in terms of NP-movement will not work for the innovativepattern in (58), i.e. the gospel is easiest to gain heaven by, in which the strandedpreposition is separated from the infinitive by an object NP. Unless the predicatecontains an idiomatic expression of the sort seen in (60), passives of thistype do not exist in modern English nor have they been possible at any pointin its history. The sentence in (66) is clearly ungrammatical.(66) *This can be gained heaven by.Disregarding the special case of idioms, the configuration [VNPPt] canonly result from wh-movement, as in the following Middle English example:(67) a sheete [ CPwhich ithat [ IPthey myghte wrappe hem inne t i]]‘a sheet that they could wrap him in.’ (Chaucer Canon’s Yeoman 879)This means that examples like (58) must have the following structure, in whichthe infinitival CP has a gap due to wh-movement of the empty operator OP toSpec, CP.(68) e gospel iis most esi [ CPOP i[ IPPRO to wynne heuene by t i]]In other words, (68) is an example with the same structure as the ‘easy-toplease’construction in present-day English, as discussed in 8.2. 8 From thisanalysis, we can derive several predictions, based on the properties of thepresent-day construction: other things being equal, we predict that, in thecourse of the fifteenth century, ‘easy-to-please’ should also become possible insentences with ‘long’ movement (He iwas easy to convince Bill to do businesswith t ior A book like that iis tough to claim you’ve read carefully t i) and withparasitic gaps (this book iis difficult to understand t iwithout reading pg verycarefully). This definitely looks like an exciting challenge, because it appearsas if we have here one of the all-too-rare occasions when a historical linguist8The late Middle English structure therefore raises the same problem concerningtheta-assignment by the adjective as it does in modern English. For a possible solutionfor the Middle English cases, see van der Wurff (1990a).