Tough-movement and raising

[pne]

The grammar of the Niuean language that I have (by Seiter, IIRC), uses the term "tough-movement" (I don't remember off-hand whether he used the hyphen in the book or not).

I recently came across this term again on the CONLANG mailing list, and don't really know what it means.

Apparently, it involves or is related to raising, which I think I sort of understand from the examples given, but I don't know what to make of tough-movement.

Can any of the linguistics geeks on my friends list provide any insight on TM and possibly raising? isabeau? pthalogreen?

Comments

[fweebles.livejournal.com]

What is raising in this context?

Vowel-raising is a pitch/tone thing that often makes it easier to distinguish central-Canadians,mostly Ontarians, from Americans (this is the idea that Americans think Canadians say "aboot" comes from).

I'm not sure this is what you're talking about, though.

Tough-movement

[ubykhlives.livejournal.com]

OK, here we go. :D

It is tough to please John (without tough-movement)
John is tough to please (with tough-movement)

As far as I can tell, in tough-movement, the focus of the sentence - in this case, the object noun John - is promoted to subject position, triggered by a restricted class of words (including easy, impossible and difficult). A tough-construction is simply one in which the dummy syntactic subject (it) and the syntactic object (John) are co-ordinated in this way. This paper (http://www.rceal.cam.ac.uk/Working%20Papers/andersonsum.htm) has a more technical definition.

Hope this helps. :)