Complement Raising In English Tough Construction

The name of the tough construction comes from the semantic meanings of the adjective predicates. It is a special syntactic structure whose structural type is decided by the properties of the predicate. In the traditional categorization, Kim summarized all the three adjective predicates into tough construction. However, only the predicate which owns the tough-easy semantic properties can be called adjective predicate of tough construction. Therefore, the author of this paper thought that the adjective categorization manner of Kim is unscientific and need to be detailed.The complement raising phenomena in tough construction has its own feature which can not be categorized into WH-movement or NP-movement respectively. A great amount of the theoretical research in the framework of the generative grammar proved the nature of complement raising in tough construction closer to the NP-movement instead of the WH-movement. Chomsky thought the complement raising in tough construction belongs to WH-movement. This thesis analyzed the disadvantage of the NP-movement hypothesis and the WH-movement hypothesis, and compared the middle construction in the NP-movement with tough construction. The evidence showed the explanations for the middle construction in the NP-movement satisfied the explanations of tough construction. It seemed that to explain the complement raising phenomena of tough construction in NP-movement hypothesis is much more plausible than to explain it in WH-movement hypothesisWe proposed a two-step hypothesis in the former theoretical and case support. This hypothesis can explain the case-driver problem in the complement raising problem in tough construction, and can explain the reason why verbs lose the ability to give case to their complement in a passivization process.