Tough movement

In formal syntax, tough movement refers to sentences in which the syntactic subject of the main verb is logically the object of an embedded non-finite verb. The following sentences illustrate tough movement.

The phenomenon was so named by Rosenbaum (1967) because prototypical example sentences like (1) involve the word tough.

In these sentences, this problem is logically the object of solve, and Chris is logically the object of please. The sentences can therefore be paraphrased as:

or

Adjectives that allow this construction include 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, and weird. This construction is also possible with noun phrases like a pleasure, a breeze, or a cinch:

and with the verb take:

Similar constructions are possible in Dutch, but with a much more limited range of predicates (van der Auweraa and Noëla 2011):

In early transformational grammar (such as Rosenbaum 1967) , this construction was analyzed as an instance of object-to-subject raising, in which the object is base-generated in the normal position after the embedded verb in the deep structure of sentences like (1-2), just as in (1a-2a), but that it is then moved to the front in the surface structure:

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