The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

282 The syntax of early English(84) hyt ys to be foryueit is to be forgiven‘it should be forgiven’ (Manning HS 12096)This construction is found next to the older type (It is to forgive), from about1300 onwards. Addition of an adverb to this construction might result in asentence like This is most easily to be done, and if the adverb did not have theending -ly (a common enough phenomenon in Middle English), the sentencewould be This is easiest to be done. Although there may have been some semanticdifferentiation of the two constructions, this is clearly a route by which‘easy-to-please’ could have acquired the option with a passive infinitive. All inall, we may conclude that, since the infinitive in the ‘easy-to-please’ constructionin Old English and (early) Middle English was passive-like anyway, it isnot surprising that the passive infinitive also spread to this sentence-type, especiallygiven the further factors promoting this that Fischer (1991) identifies.A final crinkle that remains is the somewhat puzzling simultaneity of thenew wh-pattern (This is easiest to gain heaven by) and the new passive infinitive(The eye is hardest to be healed). Both of them are first attested around 1400,but in the account given above this is entirely due to the fortuitous simultaneityof the various causative factors that played a role. A more principledexplanation for the simultaneity, which ties in these two new patterns with asound change operating in late Middle English, would run as follows: 9 whenthe infinitival ending -en was lost in late Middle English, there was noinfinitival morphology left to absorb the Case and external theta-role of theverb, making a passive interpretation of the infinitive by language learnersmore and more difficult. 10 Yet these language learners would still be exposedto tokens of the ‘easy-to-please’ construction. For the older generation, suchtokens would instantiate NP-movement, as in (62) and (63).(62) the which ibyn herdur [ IPt i[ VPto vndurstonde t i]](63) hit iesy [ IPt i[ VPto dele wi t i]]The younger generation would be faced with the task of devising a structurethat could yield surface strings like this, but the decline of the infinitival endingmeant that the NP-movement analysis was not an option for them. Oneresponse to this situation could be a reanalysis of (62) and (63) into the structuresof (69) and (70), which would yield the same sentences but derived bymeans of wh-movement. The appearance of the further pattern with preposi-9We would like to thank Anthony Warner for suggesting this approach to us.10Lass (1992: 97–8) provides figures showing clear decline in fifteenth-century texts; inspeech, the loss must have been more advanced.