Abstract
This paper presents two novel findings: I show (i) that there is a strong connection between ϕ-feature agreement and scope freezing in Swedish, and (ii) that Swedish tough-constructions (TCs) involve movement of the embedded object into the matrix subject position. Scope freezing is shown to take place in adjectival TCs, morphological passives and adjectival raising structures in Swedish, but not in verbal TCs, periphrastic passives or verbal raising constructions. The difference in scope possibilities in adjectival and verbal contexts is captured by analyzing movement induced by ϕ-feature agreement (adjectival cases) as taking place in the syntax, and purely EPP-driven movement (verbal cases) as taking place post-syntactically. Following Sauerland and Elbourne (2002), it is assumed that reconstructed readings do not involve any undoing operation but reflect the position of an element prior to post-syntactic movement. Regarding TCs, I further show that adjectival and verbal TCs in Swedish are uniformly derived via long A′–A-movement of the underlying object into the matrix subject position. Since infinitival clauses in Swedish have been shown to have a smaller structure than a full CP (Engdahl 1986), movement of the object does not violate the Williams Cycle (Williams 2003) and is therefore not an instance of Improper Movement. Swedish TCs thereby share properties both with English TCs (A′-properties) and with German TCs (long movement), placing the Swedish ones in between.
Highlights
It is a well-known property of language that the surface structure does not always match the interpretation one-to-one
On the wide scope reading of (1), there is a woman such that she is likely to buy some particular dress in question, while on the narrow scope reading, it is likely that some woman will buy that particular dress
On the assumption that the possibility of a narrow scope reading is dependent on previous movement and that the absence of such a reading suggests absence of movement, the reconstruction data seemingly point in two different directions for the derivation of TCs in Swedish: via base-generation of the subject for the adjectival group and via movement of the subject for the non-adjectival group
Summary
It is a well-known property of language that the surface structure does not always match the interpretation one-to-one. The reconstruction data in (2) seems straightforward enough: the absence of a narrow scope reading of the subject can be taken as support for analyses that take the matrix subject to be base-generated in the surface position (see among others Chomsky 1977; Browning 1989; Rezac 2006; Fleisher 2013, 2015; Keine and Poole 2016), and, to be problematic for analyses that assume movement into the subject position (see among others Rosenbaum 1967; Postal 1971; Brody 1993; Hornstein 2001; Hicks 2009; Hartman 2011a,b). The sentence in (3a), in contrast, can only mean that few people are such that each one of them is easy for Johan to talk to To my knowledge, this difference in reconstruction ability of different types of TC in Swedish has not been discussed previously in the literature.. I argue that TCs are derived via a combination of A and A-movement of the underlying object into the matrix subject position
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