The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

The history of the ‘easy-to-please’ construction 279also show that, in some cases at least, it was necessary. A first approach to doingso, found in van der Wurff (1990b, 1992b), tries to further develop the scenarioin terms of two different varieties or dialects of English influencing each other.In that way, synchronic variation is made to play a role in the change. Such aninterpretation can be based on the fact that there is a time difference in theoccurrence of preposition stranding with the various passive constructionsthat we have looked at: examples like (59), with a personal passive, are foundfrom about 1250, but cases like (64), with a modal passive, and also (57), with‘easy-to-please’, start only around 1400 (see Denison 1993: 124–62 and Visser1963–73: § 1384 for examples and details on the first two categories). (76) summarizesthese facts.(76) Grammatical spread of preposition stranding in passivesa. personal passive (past participle) 1250b. modal passive (to-infinitive) 1400c. ‘easy-to-please’ (to-infinitive) 1400This simple table of course needs to be refined for a complete picture of thespread of preposition stranding through the various passive constructions tobe obtained. A beginning on this is made by Denison (1985), who puts forwardthe interesting suggestion that stage (76a) proceeded by a process of lexicaldiffusion. Unfortunately, the frequency of the ‘easy-to-please’ construction inMiddle English is not high enough to demonstrate the relevance of thisprocess for stage (76c). We will therefore have to settle, at least for the timebeing, for the major outlines of the change as represented in (76).As (76) suggests, the reason for the differential spread of preposition strandingmay lie in the nature of the verb – past participle or infinitive; obviously,there is scope for further theoretical work to determine the structural causesof the difference. Here, we focus on the distribution of the three constructionsof (76). Unless they were distributed entirely at random, it must be supposedthat around 1400 some ‘progressive’ varieties of English already allowedpreposition stranding in the modal passive and ‘easy-to-please’, while other,‘conservative’ varieties did not. Data for locating such varieties in time andspace are not available, but this is likely to be due more to limitations on thesurvival of the Middle English data than to anything else. In such a situation,borrowing of sentences like (57), i.e. examples of (76c) (This is easy to dealwith), from a ‘progressive’ variety to a ‘conservative’ variety could lead to thecrucial reanalysis. In the ‘conservative’ variety, the modal passive did not yethave preposition stranding (i.e. This is to deal with did not occur), and the casesof ‘easy-to-please’ with preposition stranding that speakers were beingexposed to could therefore not be analysed as being due to NP-movement.