Robert Levine (levine@ling.ohio-state.edu)
Mon, 19 Dec 94 14:27:47 EST
The idea that _tough_ adjectives do confer a sementic relation on their subjects is not novel; Lasnik and Fiengo in their 1974 LI paper `Complement object deletion' provide excellent examples contrasting _tough_ constructions with true raising-to- subject constructions in this respect, and the contrast between the truth values of It's obnoxious to try to talk to Robin [because, e. g., s/he keeps a pack of starving pit bulls in her/his office] vs. Robin is obnoxious to try to talk to is robust: Robin may be personally lovely and the first could still be true, but it's hard for me to imagine a world in which Robin was personally lovely but the second was true as well. Even more to the point, maybe, is that the syntax of _too/enough_ APs is highly parallel to _tough_ in most relevant respects, but no one I think would want to claim that the subject in Robin is too stubborn to talk to. lacked a semantic relation to the head of the AP. I noted in a paper in 1984 that every single syntactic argument that Chomsky 1981 gives for treating _easy_ constructions as complex predicates (produced mid-derivation by reanalysis) is based on data which is completely paralleled by _too/enough_ examples; yet the reanalysis solution Chomsky gives, which is predicated on the lack of a subject theta-role for tough-subjects, is unavailable for _too/enough_ constructions just because the latter uncontroversially accord thematic roles to their subjects. A parallel treatment of _too/enough_ constructions, for example, would yield a violation of the theta criterion, with the subject picking up theta roles both from the _too/enough_ adjective and its trace following the complex A. Any treatment for _easy_ must extend to _too/enough_ over a large class of data (`violin/sonata' paradigms and so on) and so anything which hinges crucially on the lack of theta roles for _tough_ subjects looks as though it isn't going to work. Bob
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