 A dirty place to sit
Once again, could I ask your opinion on another difficult sentence ?
... She would sit under the acacia tree. It was a dirty place to sit.
I wondered if the transitive use of "sit" (or the omission of the preposition) might not be nonstandard here (?). But my main difficulty was concerned with the adjective "dirty". I thought (perhaps wrongly) that the kind of adjective complementation found here was comparable to well-known cases like :
John is easy to please / difficult to beat etc.,
where the syntactic subject is not to be construed as the "true" subject of the sentence (*John is easy ; *John is difficult), but in which a *nominal clause* must be construed as the notional subject of the copular verb BE ("To please John is easy" etc.).
I would reject an analysis which considered the above sentence as derived from This place is dirty
Cf. (=> ??this place is dirty for one to sit => It was a dirty place to sit)
Instead, I would be inclined to favour an analysis which saw it as derived from :
1° Sitting (in) this place is dirty (dirty has a somewhat unusual meaning here - but isn't it the same in the original sentence, It was a dirty place to sit ?.)
=> 2° It is dirty to sit (in) this place (extraposition + -ING => TO+V, as is usual in the formation of extraposed sentences)
=> 3° This place is dirty to sit (in). (object-to-subject raising)
=> 4° It is a dirty place to sit (in) => It is a dirty place to sit
A) First, can I ask you if you agree with this analysis ?
B] And if you do, *how would ou describe what happens between 3° and 4°* ?
I think 4° is *not* a cleft sentence, although it bears a formal resemblance with cleft constructions - but again, I am at a loss to describe it.
Many thanks in advance for whatever help you might provide me with.
Stephan  |