Raising

[Jean-Pierre A Koenig]

If I understood corrrectly Steve's and Bob's, HPSG can predict that only
subject can raise when cancellation is involved (i.e. if the complement is
a phrase, not a word, as in clause union/restructuring phenomena). One
potential difficult case for this analysis is so-called Tough-movement in
languages in which is a bounded dependency. French (but I have heard other
non-Romance languages are like that) is one such language, as (1)-(2)
illustrates:

(1) *Ce livre est facile a convaincre les enfants de lire
(2) Ce livre est facile a lire
(3) Ce livre est facile a faire lire aux enfants

(3) illustrates that, of course, in a clause-union (argument-structure or
comps composition) structure, you can "raise" the object from a complement
of a complement, but that's because of composition. Note that (3) also
shows that the complement to "facile" is a phrase (since it contains one
complement "aux enfants").

Now, one does not have to analyze this kind of bounded Tough-movement as
an instance of raising. E. Engdhal, for example, claims this kind of
structure is more a control structure, if I remember correctly. But since
the kind of unbounded analysis of Tough-mouvement which P&S (94) propose
is not easy to adapt to French-like languages (the use of SLASH would
predict a long-distance dependency, barring stipulative restrictions on
SLASH inheritance), it is a possible counterexample to Steve's claim, as
modified by Bob.

Anybody has any thought on how to model bounded Tough-movement, or am I
missing the boat entirely.

Best,
JP


______________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________

Jean-Pierre Koenig
Assistant Professor
Linguistics Dept.
609 Baldy Hall
University at Buffalo
The State University of New York
Buffalo, NY, 14260-1030
Phone: (716) 645-2177 (ext. 717)
Fax: (716) 645-3825
jpkoenig at acsu.buffalo.edu
http://wings.buffalo.edu/linguistics/people/koenig/koenig.shtml