In formal syntax, ''tough'' movement refers to sentences in which the syntactic subject of the

main Main may refer to: Geography * Main River (disambiguation) **Most commonly the Main (river) in Germany * Main, Iran, a village in Fars Province *"Spanish Main", the Caribbean coasts of mainland Spanish territories in the 16th and 17th centuries ...

verb is logically the object of an embedded

non-finite verb A nonfinite verb is a derivative form of a verb unlike finite verbs. Accordingly, nonfinite verb forms are inflected for neither number nor person, and they cannot perform action as the root of an independent clause. In English, nonfinite verbs in ...

. Because the object of the lower verb is absent, such sentences are also sometimes called "missing object constructions". The term ''tough'' movement reflects the fact that the prototypical example sentences in English involve the word ''tough.''

Examples

English

In (1) and (2), the (a) examples illustrate ''tough'' movement in English. In (1a) ''this problem'' is logically the object of ''solve'', and (1a) can be paraphrased as (1b) or (1c). In (2a) ''Chris'' is logically the object of ''please'', and (2a) can be paraphrased as (2b) or (2c). (1) a. This problem is tough to solve. b. It is tough to solve this problem c. To solve this problem is tough. (2) a. Chris is easy to please. b. It is easy to please Chris. c. To please Chris is easy. Adjectives that allow this type of

construction Construction is a general term meaning the art and science to form Physical object, objects, systems, or organizations,"Construction" def. 1.a. 1.b. and 1.c. ''Oxford English Dictionary'' Second Edition on CD-ROM (v. 4.0) Oxford University Pr ...

include: * list of English raising adjectives: ''amusing'', ''annoying'', ''awkward'', ''bad'', ''beautiful'', ''beneficial'', ''boring'', ''comfortable'', ''confusing'', ''convenient'', ''cumbersome'', ''dangerous'', ''delightful'', ''depressing'', ''desirable'', ''difficult'', ''dull'', ''easy'', ''educational'', ''embarrassing'', ''essential'', ''excellent'', ''exhausting'', ''expensive'', ''fashionable'', ''fine'', ''fun'', ''good'', ''great'', ''hard'', ''horrible'', ''ideal'', ''illegal'', ''important'', ''impossible'', ''impressive'', ''instructive'', ''interesting'', ''irritating'', ''loathsome'', ''necessary'', ''nice'', ''odd'', ''painful'', ''pleasant'', ''pleasurable'', ''rare'', ''risky'', ''safe'', ''simple'', ''strange'', ''tedious'', ''terrible'', ''tiresome'', ''tough'', ''tricky'', ''unpleasant'', ''useful'', ''weird'' This type of movement also occurs with noun phrases like ''a delight'', ''a pleasure'', ''a breeze'', or ''a cinch'', as well as with the complex verb ''take a long time'': (3) a. Nureyev is a delight to watch. b. It is a delight to watch Nureyev. c. To watch Nureyev is a delight (4) a. This document will take a long time to process. b. It will take a long time to process this document. c. To process this document will take a long time.

Dutch

''Tough'' movement occurs in

Dutch Dutch commonly refers to: * Something of, from, or related to the Netherlands * Dutch people () * Dutch language () Dutch may also refer to: Places * Dutch, West Virginia, a community in the United States * Pennsylvania Dutch Country People E ...

, as in (5a), which can be rephrased without ''tough'' movement as in (5b): : As observed by van der Auwera and Noël (2011), Dutch appears to have a much more limited range of predicates which trigger tough movement than English does: * list of Dutch raising adjectives: ''(ge)makkelijk'', ''simpel'', ''eenvoudig'', ''moeilijk'', ''lastig'', ''interessant'', ''leuk'', ''goed'', ''fijn'', ''geweldig'', ''prima'', ''uitstekend'', ''aangenaam'', ''essentieel'', ''veilig'', ''nuttig'', ''prettig'', ''plezierig'', ''instructief'', ''leerzaam'', ''aardig'', ''nood-zakelijk'', ''belangrijk'', ''onmogelijk'', ''pijnlijk'', ''vervelend'', ''saai'', ''irritant'', ''duur'', ''gevaarlijk'', ''link'', ''deprimerend'', ''vreemd'', ''raar'' Unlike English, Dutch raising predicates do not include noun phrases.

Spanish

''Tough'' movement occurs in

Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Can ...

, as in (6a) and (7a). Equivalent sentences without ''tough'' movement also occur, as in (6b) and (7b). The class of words that can trigger ''tough-''movement in Spanish is smaller than in English; in Spanish only adjectives can do so, not noun phrases like in English. According to Sauer (1972), Cited in Reider (1993). Spanish ''tough''-movement adjectives must in general express some degree of difficulty. However, in certain dialects adjectives like ''interesante'' 'interesting' also participate in ''tough''-movement: thus, the sentence in (8) was accepted as grammatical by 7 out of 16 native Spanish speakers: Reider (1993) conducted a survey where 16 native speakers of Spanish (eight European and eight

Latin American Latin Americans ( es, Latinoamericanos; pt, Latino-americanos; ) are the citizens of Latin American countries (or people with cultural, ancestral or national origins in Latin America). Latin American countries and their diasporas are multi-eth ...

) answered whether they thought 27 sentences showing ''tough'' movement with different adjectives were grammatical, and found that Latin American Spanish speakers tended to accept ''tough'' movement with more adjectives, but there was considerable variability between speakers; no two speakers had the exact same response for all 27 sentences. This led Reider to propose that rather than a semantic reason for why certain adjectives can trigger ''tough'' movement and others cannot, instead it may be encoded separately for each word in a speaker's mental lexicon.

Japanese

Example of a ''tough'' construction in

Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...

is given in (9a).

Inoue's 1978 classifiation

''Tough'' constructions in Japanese are formed by combining verb stems such as 'yomi' to read, and one of the adjectives 'yasui' meaning easy to, or 'nikui' meaning difficult to, resulting in a form like 'yomiyasui' easy to read, or 'yominikui' difficult to read. According to Inoue there are 4 types of ''tough'' constructions in Japanese simply labelled as Type I, Type II, Type III and Type IV an example of each of these is shown below. Inoue remarked that the difference between these types depended on the verb and broadly categorized Types I and II as containing verbs where the action is controlled by the

agent Agent may refer to: Espionage, investigation, and law *, spies or intelligence officers * Law of agency, laws involving a person authorized to act on behalf of another ** Agent of record, a person with a contractual agreement with an insuranc ...

of the sentence, and the verbs in Types III and IV as containing verbs where the action is not controlled by the agent.

Ohkado's 1993 classification

In a 1993 doctoral thesis Ohkado proposed that Japanese has three types of ''tough'' constructions, according to whether the sentence begins with a Theme argument, a Location argument, or a Goal argument . An example of each of these types of constructions can be seen below: Ohkado suggested that the theme construction is a result of NP movement, while the location and goal constructions are a result of

wh-movement In linguistics, wh-movement (also known as wh-fronting, wh-extraction, or wh-raising) is the formation of syntactic dependencies involving interrogative words. An example in English is the dependency formed between ''what'' and the object position ...

. This suggests that while both location and goal constructions contain a wh-island, the theme construction does not and therefore allows for clause internal

scrambling Scrambling is a mountaineering term for ascending steep terrain using one's hands to assist in holds and balance.''New Oxford American Dictionary''. It is also used to describe terrain that falls between hiking and rock climbing (as a “scrambl ...

Analyses

Noam Chomsky Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky i ...

noted the existence of such constructions (though not by name) in Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (1964), giving the example 'John is easy to please' and noting that ''John'' is the

direct object In linguistics, an object is any of several types of arguments. In subject-prominent, nominative-accusative languages such as English, a transitive verb typically distinguishes between its subject and any of its objects, which can include but ...

of the verb ''please''. He contrasted it with the sentence 'John is eager to please,' where instead ''John'' is the logical subject of ''please'', in order to illustrate that a single static phrase structure tree is inadequate to explain the underlying phenomenon.

Object-to-subject raising

In a thesis supervised by Chomsky, Peter Rosenbaum addressed the construction, identifying "the class of adjectives including "difficult," "easy," and several others." Rosenbaum introduced a

transformation Transformation may refer to: Science and mathematics In biology and medicine * Metamorphosis, the biological process of changing physical form after birth or hatching * Malignant transformation, the process of cells becoming cancerous * Tran ...

analysis, in which the object of the verb phrase moves out of the complement sentence and is raised to the main subject position: : Bill_''i'' is difficult or John to [hit ''t''_''i'' (''t'' stands for trace and indicates the gap left in the constituent's original position; the subscript ''i'' is an index to show that the subject originated from the trace position.)

Null operator raising

In classical government and binding theory it is no longer assumed that the object is moved directly to the subject position. Rather, Chomsky (1977) proposed that the subject NP is base-generated in the main clause, and a null operator raises within in the embedded clause: : Chris_''i'' is easy p_''i'' PRO_''j'' to please ''t_i''(see the tree diagram of the embedded clause below) : In clauses without an explicit subject, the subject is assumed to be a null/covert (unpronounced) pronoun, designated PRO, which Chomsky called "arbitrary in reference," although the referent(s) may be assumed from context. The evidence for the subject being PRO is that it can participate in partial control, for example: :Gilgamesh_i convinced Enkidu_j that the cedars_k will be fun/easy RO_i+j to seek ''t''_k together_i+j :Finn_i persuaded Hengest_j that a hall_k would be more fun RO_i+j to meet in ''t''_k In these two examples, the null PRO is understood to refer to both i and j (both Gilgamesh and Enkidu in the first example; both Finn and Hengest in the second), distinct from the ''tough'' movement subject k; partial control is when a controller or antecedent of the subject of an embedded clause is a subset of the understood subject of the embedded clause. Furthermore Chomsky suggested that instead of separate rules for tough movement, comparative deletion,

topicalization Topicalization is a mechanism of syntax that establishes an expression as the sentence or clause topic by having it appear at the front of the sentence or clause (as opposed to in a canonical position further to the right). This involves a phrasa ...

clefting A cleft sentence is a complex sentence (one having a main clause and a dependent clause) that has a meaning that could be expressed by a simple sentence. Clefts typically put a particular constituent into focus. In spoken language, this focusing is ...

, object-deletion, adjective and adjective-qualifier complements, etc., all might be explained by a more general ''wh''-movement analysis.

Tough deletion

An alternative explanation for ''tough'' constructions involves no movement, relying instead on "Tough Deletion," wherein the subject appears twice in the underlying form, both in the main subject and embedded object positions, and the latter is then deleted, like so: :Fred_X is tough for Dick_Y to Y throw snowballs at X→ Fred is tough for Dick to throw snowballs at. Postal and Ross argued against this proposal, saying that an additional deletion rule would be required to explain the absence of a subject within the clausal subject in sentences like the following: :Getting herself arrested on purpose is hard for me to imagine Betsy being willing to consider. ''Getting herself arrested'' is said without a subject, and yet ''herself'' is understood to refer to Betsy. Due to the need for an extra rule to account for this under "Tough Deletion," a movement analysis is preferred.

Similar constructions

The ''tough'' movement construction in English is similar to but distinct from ''pretty'' constructions and adjectives modified by ''too'' or ''enough'': : These pictures are pretty to look at. : Lee's mattress is too lumpy to sleep on. For one, these latter constructions do not allow an alternate form with an unraised object: : *It is pretty to look at these pictures. : *It is too lumpy to sleep on Lee's mattress. or fronted infinitive: : *To look at these pictures is pretty. : *To sleep on Lee's mattress is too lumpy.