Dr. Sandra Chung (UC Santa Cruz) will give a colloquium in the seminar room of Totem Field Studios.
A Different Take on Tough
Abstract: Far more is known about the crosslinguistic profiles of control and raising than about tough movement (henceforth TM), the construction famously exemplified by John is easy to please (Chomsky 1964). One reason for this: the analysis of English TM has been controversial since the mid-1970’s, and remains controversial today. In this talk, I first sketch a novel approach to English TM that closely parallels the head-raising analysis of relative clauses developed by Bianchi 1999, Bhatt 2002, Sichel 2014, and others. The idea is that TM involves NP raising – an NP raises from an embedded clause to merge with a D that satisfies the referential / quantificational requirements of the higher adjective. I show that the NP raising account does a remarkably good job of handling the empirical intricacies of English TM, including the TM subject’s thematic connectedness to the embedded clause, its ability to reconstruct for variable binding, and its inability to reconstruct for scope. I then turn to Chamorro, an Austronesian language of the Mariana Islands. Chamorro has a complex sentence type formed from higher adjectives comparable to the adjectives found in English TM; e.g. mapput ‘hard’, libiånu ‘easy’, and so on. The Chamorro construction is superficially quite different from English TM. Nonetheless, I show that it involves movement, and this movement is best analyzed as NP raising. In broader perspective, this investigation contributes to the goal of decomposing complex sentence types into smaller, more elemental parts.
