Experiencer intervention in English tough movement: Evidence from extraction of the tough adjective against syntactic- and semantic-intervention accounts

Abstract

It was first observed over a decade ago that the presence of experiencers leads to degradation in English tough movement. In the literature, this has been linked to either syntactic or semantic intervention. I will show that a crucial piece of data has been ignored in this debate, the possibility of extracting the tough adjective without the nonfinite CP. Under previous approaches, this seems to require extraposition of the CP. However, once extraposition is possible, the intervention configuration can no longer be prevented. I will argue instead that the restrictions on experiencer placement can be accounted for if the nonfinite CP is instead projected as an external argument and if null-operator clauses of this type cannot be extraposed. The “intervention” effect thus turns out to be completely unrelated to intervention but rather follows from basic word-order properties of the language.