ON THE NATURE OF THE MEANING DIFFERENCE
BETWEEN THE ENGLISH TOUGH-CONSTRUCTION AND ITS IT-ANALOG CONSTRUCTION

Gwang-Yoon GohYonsei University
The (English) TOUGH-CONSTRUCTION (TC) is a syntactic pattern which was often considered
to involve so-called TOUGH-MOVEMENT (i.e., a transformational rule which moves an NP outof the predicate of a complement clause in early generative transformational grammar), as is
illustrated in (1):(1)(a) Tomi is tough to please __i.
(b) That old mani is difficult to argue against __i.

In the above examples, the syntactic subject of a tough-adjective such as easy, hard, anddifficult is interpreted as semantically (and sometimes syntactically as well) being responsible
for a gap in the infinitival complement phrase.
Ever since the TC in English began to attract the attention of early transformational
grammarians,1 one of the most controversial issues about the construction has been whether
the tough-subject position is thematic or not. This semantic issue concerns whether the toughadjective (along with the following infinitival phrase) in a tough-sentence assigns a semanticrole to its syntactic subject. Although the position that the tough-subject is thematic has
widely been assumed in both derivational and non-derivational syntactic frameworks sinceLasnik and Fiengo (1974), it is still highly controversial whether or not this widely-heldassumption is a truly well-motivated position which correctly reflects the nature of themeaning of the English TC.
Furthermore, there are some important questions that still need to be more fully
resolved about the meanings of the TC and its IT-ANALOG CONSTRUCTION (IC). In particular,
although there have been occasional claims for a meaning difference between the TC and theIC and a few suggestions about how the difference can be defined, virtually no previous
1Lees (1960) is probably the earliest paper on the English TC. The TC has been a focus of discussion eversince Chomsky’s (1964: 61−5) discussion of pairs of sentences such as John is eager to please and John iseasy to please, in which the NP John in the first sentence is the subject of eager whereas it is theunderstood object of please in the second sentence.

studies have been fully successful in identifying its substance and demonstrating its presence
and role in the actual use of language.
This study explores the meaning and use of the English TC and IC with a dual goal:
first, to argue for the additional meaning of ‘responsibility’ assignable to the tough-subject bydemonstrating its role as a factor determining the language user’s choice between the twoalternative constructions, and second, to argue against the widely-held assumption about thethematicity of the tough-subject by clarifying the nature of the additional meaning, which
often results in a meaning difference between the two constructions. Discussion on the former
will be based mainly on the analysis of the corpus data from the British Component of theInternational Corpus of English (ICE-GB), while discussion for the latter will be done withthe balance between the corpus-based and intuition-based approach in mind.
In the presentation, after briefly reviewing the current understanding of the TC andraises issues to address, I will first propose to explain the meaning difference between the TC
and the IC by using the concept of ‘assignment of responsibility’ and show how positing thismeaning difference as a factor determining the language user’s choice between the twoalternative constructions can illuminate the use of the TC and the IC. Then, I will look moreclosely into the nature of the additional meaning, which is evidenced to be often assignable tothe tough-subject, to determine whether the tough-subject can be considered truly thematic.
In short, the results of this study will show that despite the possible difference in meaning
between the two constructions, the tough-subject cannot be considered thematic because thepresence and absence of the additional meaning that can occasionally be assigned to thetough-subject is not inherent to the TC and can be pragmatically explained.
References
Lasnik, Howard & Robert Fiengo. 1974. Complement object deletion. LI 5, 535−71.
Lees, Robert B. 1960. A multiply ambiguous adjectival construction in English. Language 36,207−21.
Chomsky, Noam. 1964. Current issues in linguistic theory. The Hague: Mouton & Co.