Intervention in tough-constructions revisited

In this paper, we subject to closer scrutiny one particularly influential recent argument in favour of the long-movement analysis of tough-constructions. Hartman (2011, 2012a, 2012b) discovered that experiencer PPs lead to ungrammaticality in tough-constructions, but not in expletive constructions. He attributes this ungrammaticality to defective intervention of A-movement, a movement step crucially postulated only in the long-movement analysis. He takes this as evidence that tough-constructions are derived via long movement. We make the novel observation that a PP intervention effect analogous to that in tough-constructions also arises in constructions that do not involve A-movement, namely pretty-predicate constructions and gapped degree phrases. Consequently, the intervention effect does not provide an argument for an A-movement step in tough-constructions or for the long-movement analysis, but rather for the base-generation analysis. We develop a uniform account of the intervention effects as a semantic-type mismatch. In particular, we propose that what unifies tough-constructions, pretty-predicate constructions, and gapped degree phrases is that they all have an embedded clause that is a null-operator structure. Introducing an experiencer PP into these constructions creates an irresolvable semantic-type mismatch. As such, we argue for a reassessment of what appears to be a syntactic locality constraint as an incompatibility in the semantic composition.

English comparatives as degree-phrase relative clauses

It has been observed (e.g. Chomsky 1977) that English questions allow wh-movement of adjective phrases, but relative clauses do not, which is cited as a notable difference between two types of constructions that are otherwise very similar. However, I argue that relative clauses actually can arise from the whmovement of adjective phrases (which I here treat as degree phrases headed by a degree element) and that comparative clauses are the result; i.e., comparatives are actually relative clauses headed by degree phrases. This analysis removes the discrepancy between questions and relative clauses with regard to adjective movement, thereby further uniting the syntactic analysis of the two constructions.

Reply to Bhatt and Pancheva's “Late Merger of Degree Clauses”: The Irrelevance of (Non)conservativity

According to Bhatt and Pancheva (2004), two effects they attribute to degree constructions (obligatory extraposition effects and scope rigidity effects determined by the superficial position of degree phrases/clauses) can be given a unified analysis in terms of an extension of Fox and Nissenbaum's (1999) analysis of extraposition in conjunction with the nonconservativity of (certain) degree words. We show that, under full preservation of Bhatt and Pancheva's theoretical assumptions, their account faces at least three problems: (a) one of the phenomena they propose to unify, the one involving scope effects, does not exist; (b) (non)conservativity is irrelevant to obligatory extraposition effects; and (c) contrary to their tacit assumption, Trace Conversion is at most an optional procedure for DegP chains. We propose an alternative, nonsemantic treatment of obligatory extraposition effects, which subsumes them under an independently needed adjacency constraint on prehead modifiers. Furthermore, we note that the facts brought up here and in Bhatt and Pancheva 2004 call into question the quantificational approach to degree constructions.