Tough Constructions Research Articles

The formation of the kě 可 and kě yǐ 可以 constructions

AbstractThis paper aims to explain the formation of the kě and kě yǐ constructions in archaic Chinese. We analyze a number of examples from the pre-Qin era to refute previous hypotheses that the kě construction is formed by adding kě to a notional passive, fronting the object in an active sentence including kě, or solely by reanalysis. Subsequently, a verb-moving-backward hypothesis is proposed: kě is used in the underlying structure ‘V-O’ + kě to comment on an already known proposition ‘V-O’, then V is moved to the end to avoid the top-heavy problem. Similarly, this hypothesis also accounts for the kě yǐ construction: kě in the underlying structure ‘yǐ-X-V-Y’ + kě is to comment on the serial verb structure ‘yǐ-X-V-Y’, which is interchangeable with ‘X-yǐ-V-Y’ forming ‘X-yǐ-V-Y’ + kě where ‘yǐ-V-Y’ is moved after kě to avoid the top-heavy problem. Moreover, the “verb moving backward” hypothesis provides new insights into the formation process of similar constructions (e.g., nán 难 ‘be difficult to V,’ yì 易 ‘be easy to V,’ zú 足 ‘be sufficient to V’ constructions) in ancient Chinese, as well as the study of tough constructions.

Agreement and reconstruction correlate in Swedish

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.

A Sideward Movement Approach to Tough Constructions(Proceedings of the 63rd Conference,The Tohoku English Literary Society)

A Sideward Movement Approach to Tough Constructions(Proceedings of the 63rd Conference,The Tohoku English Literary Society)

The nature of the passive, with an analysis of Vietnamese

We attempt to clarify a great deal of confusion in the literature on what a passive is, and what counts as a passive in different languages. We do this through a detailed investigation of what has been identified as a passive in Vietnamese, sentences with the morphemes bị and được. We also compare these to Mandarin Chinese bei. We show that these morphemes are not passive at all: like English auxiliaries, they may occur with either an active complement or a passive one. We clarify this point and what it means to be a passive. Second, sentences with these morphemes and the corresponding sentences without them are truth-conditionally equivalent. We show that the extra meaning they convey is a type of projective, or not-at-issue, meaning that is separate from the at-issue content of the sentence. We provide a detailed syntactic and semantic analysis of Vietnamese, and give arguments for this analysis. We propose that there is no movement in Vietnamese, but there is in Chinese, and this difference accounts for differences between the two languages. We also clarify what agent-oriented adverbs of the ‘deliberately’ type show, and draw conclusions about English get passives and tough constructions.

A Study on Tough Constructions in English

A Study on Tough Constructions in English

Re-thinking FNI

This paper discusses the classification of null instantiation phenomena in Construction Grammar and proposes a different treatment of so-called free null instantiation (FNI). Based on e.g. control data, different types of alleged FNI are shown to be more accurately classified as definite (adjunct control), generic (e.g. tough constructions), or unspecified for interpretation (e.g. passives). A striking pattern is that general constructions, such as infinitives and gerunds, license unspecified null instantiation (simply NI), whereas more specific control constructions are associated with a definite (DNI) or generic (GNI) interpretation. Hence, the paper proposes a null instantiation taxonomy that distinguishes (unspecified) NI and the specific subtypes definite (DNI), indefinite (INI), identity of sense (ISNA), and generic (GNI) null instantiation.

Korean tough constructions and double nominative constructions

In (1), the subject NP is coindexed with the missing object of the embedded predicate. This connectivity is unbounded because there is in principle no bound on the depth of embedding of the missing object. In Korean, a group of adjectives that is semantically similar to English tough predicates shows the same dependency. This group includes himtulta ‘tough’, ’swipta ‘easy’, elyepta ‘hard’, pulkanunghata ‘impossible’, etc., and examples are given in (/refexa).

The gray area of supine clauses

This paper aims to clarify the categorial and syntactic status of supine forms in Romanian. It appears that the supine is a [+N][+V] category that lacks o-features and differs from adjectives with reference to distribution, thematic properties, and syntactic checking. Crucially, the absence of o-features reflects on the syntactic configuration, which becomes valid in only two instances: within a DP, or within a CP structure. Supine complementation is the optimal choice for tough constructions. Checking conditions on [N] features in these constructions have as side effect a form of clause union. The result is a monoclausal structure, more economical in operations than tough constructions with infinitive or subjunctive complements.

'Tough' complementation and the extraclausal propagation of argument descriptions

The complement structure of tough constructions containing VP complements with gap sites linked to the tough predicate subject has been subject to considerable discussion in the syntactic literature, with an apparent consensus that in John is easy for us to please, for us is a PP constituent which controls the subject specification of the following infinitival constituent. I reexamine the classical arguments for this position, including Bresnan's seminal 1971 paper which first argued for this control structure analysis, and argue that none of these arguments are empirically tenable. In all cases, data exist which convincingly undermine central claims or assumptions, and hence there turns out to be no convincing reason to prefer the control structure over the clausal analysis, introduced in Postal's 1971 monograph on crossover and defended in the Gazdar et al. monograph on generalized phrase structure grammar, in which for us to please is a clausal complement to easy. I then offer a number of arguments for the superiority of the clausal analysis, appealing to data from comparatives, parasitic gap constructions and extraposition. My claim that tough complementation of the kind alluded to is clausal must, if sound, be compatible with standardly assumed semantics for these constructions, in which the subject of the complement clause must also serve as an argument of the tough predicate — a conclusion seemingly at odds with a clausal complement syntax. The difficulty is that a constituent whose denotation is one of the terms in the relation denoted by the tough predicate must be retrieved from with a clause, where it is presumably inaccessible under normal Montegovian compositional assumptions. I offer further cross-linguistic evidence based on Guyanese Creole that such an apparent conflict between syntax and semantics is unavoidable, and then offer a syntactic solution, based on work by Detmar Meurers which posits a HEAD feature for verbs structure-shared with their SUBJspecification. This device, which also can be argued for in English on the basis of the Richard construction and several other phenomena, offers a way for information about the subject to be accessible to specifications of the selecting head in a way which compromises locality to the minimal extent possible.

An NP-movement Account of Tough Constructions

Chomsky's (1981) wh-movement analysis of tough constructions is inadequate when tough subjects involving internal [theta]-relations are considered--unless, as Jones (1983) observes, generalized transformations, abandoned long ago, are now reintroduced in the Government-Binding (GB) framework. To replace Chomsky's solution and thereby to obviate the need for generalized transformations in GB theory, an alternative analysis is proposed in this paper in which the tough subject originates as an embedded object, is subsequently reanalyzed as the complement of a derived adjective, and finally undergoes NP-movement to subject position. It is shown that this analysis accounts for a wide range of data, including tough constructions exhibiting wh-island effects and tough constructions containing a parasitic gap. If the solution advocated here is correct, then it must be concluded that the reintroduction of generalized transformations is simply not motivated in the case of these constructions.

Dynamism and Tough Constructions.

In this paper, a tough-moved sentence in English is analyzed within the framework of the Dynamic Model of Grammar developed mainly by Kajita (1977, 1986, 1992). It is shown that a tough construction like The book is easy to read is lexically or pragmatically extended from a simple basic predication sentence like The book is easy through syntactico-semantic discrepancy called meaning-concealment and the rule of syntactic realization. It will be argued that this extension hypothesis can account for many idiosyncratic problems concerning tough constructions, for example, (i) control of an empty subject in an embedded clause, (ii) strict semantic restriction in the selection of embedded verbs, and (iii) difference in syntactic behavior between an embedded infinitival clause of a tough-sentence and that of an eager-sentence.

On Tough Movement in Spanish

Competing analyses of the tough construction in Spanish (e.g., ellibro esfdcilde lee;') make some very different predictions concerning the kinds of predicate adjectives that can govern the construction as well as the co-occurrence of an acceptable it is counterpart (esfdcil leer el libro) . These predictions were recently tested in the grammatical judgment survey discussed in the present study. The results of the survey indicate, among other things, that the choice of adjectives which govern Spanish tough sentences varies from one speaker to another. However, there are some definite patterns that emerge from these judgments which lend credence to the claim that tough constructions and it is constructions are transformationably related.

On the disunity of unbounded dependency constructions

Since Noam Chomsky's 1977 paper ‘On wh-movement’, syntactic theorists almost universally have assumed that tough/too/enough constructions are to be treated by the same formal mechanism as wh-extraction constructions, in spite of well-known syntactic divergences between the two types. We argue that these divergences reflect a real dichotomy between unbounded dependencies with fillers in A(rgument) positions, e.g. tough constructions, and those whose fillers occupy non-argument (A-bar) positions, e.g. topicalization. We first show that strong external evidence exists supporting the GPSG-internal prediction of full syntactic connectivity between Aposition fillers and their gap sites, but that this result seems contradicted by the existence of case conflict between the filler and gap. To overcome this contradiction, we introduce a new gap-licensing feature GAP, and show how a number of other divergences between A- and A-bar filler/gap constructions follow as a consequence.