The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

preposition is fronted, for instance by wh-movement (72) or by passivization(73):(72) a. Who did you talk to?b. Which garage did you put the car in?c. Which allegation did you take offence at?(73) a. The doctor reassured Harry that his mother was cared forb. John was taken advantage ofc. Fred was kept tabs onThe effect of moving the object of the preposition is to leave the prepositionstranded. The restrictions on such stranding are quite a bit more rigorous inpassives than in sentences involving wh-movement. A general restriction isthat the stranded preposition is part of a complement PP, i.e. a PP that is anargument of the verb. This is true for all the examples in (72)–(73); (74) illustratesthe impossibility of stranding in a prepositional time adjunct:(74) a. *Which dinner did you arrive after?b. *The dinner was served an excellent Sauternes afterIn wh-movement constructions, the stranded preposition is therefore alwayssomewhere in the VP. The restrictions in passivization are even stricter:prepositional passives are really restricted to those cases where the prepositionis adjacent to the verb, as in (73a), and to fixed lexical combinations of the sortexemplified in (73b–c). Thus, it is not the case that all prepositional objects ina complement PP can be passivized, as the ungrammaticality of the followingexamples shows:(75) a. *The garage was put the car inb. *The allegation was taken offence atc. *Syntax was written a book aboutAn outline of Old English syntax 65Preposition stranding in Old English had a very different distribution. We canbe brief on prepositional passives: passivization of a prepositional object wasimpossible in Old English, presumably because prepositions governed aninherent case in Old English. We saw in section 2.2.1 (see (7a–b)) that onlyobjects marked for structural case can be passivized, and there are no obviousfurther restrictions in Old English that would block passivization.We turn then to preposition stranding in wh-movement constructions. Whmovementconstructions comprise questions, relative clauses (includinginfinitival relatives), and some types of adjective infinitive constructionswhich will be discussed in chapter 8. What these constructions share is movementof some constituent, a question word or relative pronoun (which may bephonetically empty), to the specifier of CP. This is called wh-movement. Our