tough construction in Pollard and Sag 1994

[incheol]

Dear list members,

After I posted my query on the tough construction, I received very helpful
comments and information about the literature. Many thanks to Ivan Sag,
Sun-Hee Lee, Mike Calcagno, Claire Grover, Hee-Rhak Chae, Paul Kay and other
list members.

With respect to the issue of whether the subject of the tough construction
is the semantic argument of easy class predicates, there are two diffierent
opinions: Partee (1977) among many others shows that there exist different
interpretations between the two sentences below:

(1) The target is hard to hit with the arrow.
(2) The arrow is hard to hit the target with.

However, Bayer (1990), among many others, quite plausibly argues that those
meaning differences are drawn from the discourse function, but not from
entailments from the predicates.

To a certain extent, both arguments are pursuasive although I am more
convinced by the latter argument. However, at this early stage of my
research, I don't yet have an opinion on this issue.

Aside from other helpful information, the references below were sent to me
by members on this mailing list. The first set is a list of works that focus
specifically on the issue:

Partee, B. (1977) 'John is Easy to Please,' in A. Zampolli (ed.), Linguistic
Structures Processing, pp. 281--312.
Chae, Hee-Rahk. (1998) ' A Comparative Analysis of Tough- and Comparative
Constructions in English and Korean' Ohak Yonku/Language Research. Vol.
34,1.
Pollard and Sag (1994): p. 167. foonote 8.
Chung, Yoon-Suk (2001) Tough Construction in English: a construction grammar
approach, Dissertation, UC Berkeley.

Other works that address other properties of the construction are also
listed below:

Groover, Claire (1995) Rethinking some Empty Categories: Missing Objects and
Parastic Gaps in HPSG. Ph.D. dissertation. University of Edinburgh.

Levin, Rober (2000) 'Tough' complementation and the extraclausal propagation
of argument descriptions (214-228), HPSG-00 online proceedings.

Mike Calcagno (1999).Some Thoughts on Tough Movement.In: Valia Kordoni
(ed.), Tübingen Studies in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Volume 132.
Arbeitspapiere des SFB 340, pp. 198--230. Universität Tübingen

Lee, S-H (2002) Unbounded dependency in Korean Tough constructions,
Proceedings of the 2002 LSK pp. 427-439. (It is also available at
web.kyunghee.ac.kr/~lsk2002. )

Lee, S-H (2002) Korean Tough Constructions and Double Nominative
Constructions. www.kyunghee.ac.kr/~hpsg2002. (Only the abstract is
available in this address and the paper will be available sometime soon
through HPSG-02 online proceedings.)


Thank you all,

Incheol Choi