Easy-type adjectives and constituency

In earlier generative grammar, sentences associated with Easy-type adjectives such as easy, hard, simple, difficult, tough, and so on had been derived by transformations, and assumed to be derived from a single underlying structure. And the difference of sentential types resulted from transformations. But this earlier analysis raises constituency problem in that each of ‘easy to please’ and ‘easy to please John’ forms a different constituent regardless of having the same underlying structure. And this NP-Movement results in the violation of the Specified Subject Condition in Chomsky(1977). To solve these problems Chomsky(1977) proposed that in ‘tough’ constructions, the matrix subject NP is related indirectly to the gap in the complement clause by means of two distinct rules.; Wh-Movement and Rule of Predication. But in Chomsky(1977)’s approach, the interpretation of the constructions is not determined by only the pure Wh-Movement and is supplemented by the Rule of Predication and other as hoc conditions. And Chomsky(1981) introduces the Rule of Reanalysis to ‘tough’ constraction to solve Chomsky(1977)’s problems, but the Reanalysis approach damages the fundamental principles, such as the projection principle, the Thematic theory, and the control theory. Recently, in the sentence like ‘John is easy to please.’, the matrix subject position which is base-generated has known to be non-θ-position. So, D-structure cannot be a pure representation of θ-structure. To solve these two problems, I assume that Easy-type adjectives have two separate lexical structures and the unit of ‘Easy-type adjective+to+ Verb’ forms a single constituent, a complex lexical item which is lexically base-generated in the lexicon. But this approach has problems that produce an uninterpretable trace in D-structure, and that need a new device to provide a suitable interpretation for the trace. To solve these problems, I propose a new model of ‘tough’ constructions based on Chomsky(1992)’s Minimalist approach.