Predicting the Probability of Tough Construction from the Tough Object's Syntactic Category

Abstract

This paper sets forth the syntactic alternation between the tough construction (TC, e.g. The bear is easy to see.) and the tough-related extraposition construction (EC, e.g. It is easy to see the bear.). The TC-EC alternation shows proportional difference in the overall ratio of TC to EC (4:6). This difference is accounted for by syntactic factors such as Syntactic Category, Modification. The odds ratio of TC to EC in the Syntactic Category was 8.9:1.1 for Pronoun, 4.2:5.8 for DP, 1.4:8.6 for NP, and 0:10 for CP. The odds in the Modification was 6.4 to 3.6 for Head-only, 3.3:6.7 for Premodified, 0:10 for Postmodified. With the Syntactic Category remaining as the only single predictor variable of the probability of the TC, a pronoun tough object is 45.5 times more likely to occur in TC than an NP tough object, 10.5 times than a DP tough object. These findings were obtained by a chi-square test of independence and a logistic regression analysis with 100 tough-related utterances from the spoken texts of on-line corpus COCA. (Seoul National University)