easy/eager

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

elizabeth zwicky noted the following from Robert Pastor on the 2/28/04
Weekend Edition Saturday on NPR:

   It's not a government with which the international community will be
easy to deal.

at first i thought that pastor had gotten into this by embarking on a
relative clause construction, opting for a fronted rather than stranded
preposition (possibly because fronted prepositions are perceived as
being more formal, more elegant, and more standard), and then
continuing with a "tough-movement" (a.k.a. object-to-subject raising)
clause, which, unfortunately, doesn't permit preposition fronting
(there's no place to move the preposition *to* in "This will not be
easy for the international community to deal with").  but then how did
"the international community" end up as the subject of "will be
easy..."?

the grammatical alternatives to what pastor said are pretty distant
from it:

   It's not a government...
     which will be easy for the international community to deal with./
     with which the international community will find it easy to deal./
     with which the international community will easily deal.

eventually it occurred to me that pastor might simply have blended
tough-movement and the equi construction with predicates like "be
eager":

   It's not a government with which the international community will be
eager to deal.

it's possible, even likely, that pastor intended to assert both
difficulty of dealing with this government and lack of enthusiasm on
the part of the international community, and ended up with the syntax
for the latter but the head adjective for the former.  this is, of
course, just inspired speculation, but that's pretty much all we have;
it would undoubtedly be pointless to ask him what he had on his mind.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu), with echoes of "John is easy/eager
to please"
   in his head