The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

278 The syntax of early Englishthese that This is easy to deal with, with the same wh-derivation, was also possible.Although such influence from a similar construction seems plausibleenough, this answer is not entirely satisfactory. First, it suffers from the samedrawbacks as any other appeal to the notion of analogy which does not specifywhy the analogical change took place at the particular time that it did, and notearlier or later. In this case, the question would be why the introduction ofpreposition stranding in ‘easy-to-please’ did not take place already in OldEnglish. This problem could perhaps be solved by saying that analogicalfactors may lie dormant for a certain period of time without actually givingrise to change. But the explanation then implies that the change in ‘easy-toplease’,which took place in late Middle English, might just as well have happenedin the Old English period, or not at all. Obviously, such explanationscannot be considered completely satisfactory. Although the pretty-constructionmay have exerted some anological pressure on the ‘easy-to-please’construction, the Old English data show that this pressure by itself was notstrong enough to bring about the change that we are considering.Moreover, there is a much more plausible source for the rise of prepositionstranding in the ‘easy-to-please’ construction. Several times now, we havenoted that in Middle English, passives with preposition stranding became possible;we have given examples in (59) and (60). Since ‘easy-to-please’ was alsoan NP-movement construction (see 8.3), it developed the possibility ofpreposition stranding as well. That is, the infinitival clause came to allow theconfiguration [to V P t], with t as the trace of NP-movement. (57) is anexample. Its development can be explained fairly simply by the rise of prepositionstranding in regular passives.The appearance of the pattern in (57), i.e. This is easy to deal with, once itis viewed as being due to the prior change in ordinary passives, can beexploited to account for the appearance of sentences like (58), i.e. This is easyto gain heaven by, with the configuration [V NP P t], in which wh-movementmust have applied. We can hypothesize that (57), although originally aninstance of NP-movement, as shown in (63), was reanalysed at some point asan example of wh-movement, as shown in (70). If a language acquirer interpreted(57) as involving wh-movement, then she would automatically be led toassume that examples like (58) were also possible. This may have been the waysuch sentences first started.A valid objection to this scenario could be that there was apparently nothingforcing the language acquirer to reanalyse the relevant sentences as cases ofwh-movement: they could have remained instances of NP-movement. Clearly,from a theoretical point of view, it would be better if, having demonstrated thatthe wh-movement analysis for the construction in (57) was possible, we could