In this paper, we subject to closer scrutiny one particularly influential recent argument in favour of the long-movement analysis of tough-constructions. Hartman (2011, 2012a, 2012b) discovered that experiencer PPs lead to ungrammaticality in tough-constructions, but not in expletive constructions. He attributes this ungrammaticality to defective intervention of A-movement, a movement step crucially postulated only in the long-movement analysis. He takes this as evidence that tough-constructions are derived via long movement. We make the novel observation that a PP intervention effect analogous to that in tough-constructions also arises in constructions that do not involve A-movement, namely pretty-predicate constructions and gapped degree phrases. Consequently, the intervention effect does not provide an argument for an A-movement step in tough-constructions or for the long-movement analysis, but rather for the base-generation analysis. We develop a uniform account of the intervention effects as a semantic-type mismatch. In particular, we propose that what unifies tough-constructions, pretty-predicate constructions, and gapped degree phrases is that they all have an embedded clause that is a null-operator structure. Introducing an experiencer PP into these constructions creates an irresolvable semantic-type mismatch. As such, we argue for a reassessment of what appears to be a syntactic locality constraint as an incompatibility in the semantic composition.

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Under certain circumstances, speakers are subject to so-called spurious NPI licensing effects, whereby they perceive that NPIs without a c–commanding licensor are in fact licensed and grammatical. Previous studies have all involved the presence of a licensor in a position that linearly precedes, but does not c–command the NPI. In this paper, we show that spurious NPI licensing can occur in the outright absence of a licensor, in contexts that force an exhaustive parse. We reason that at least these instances of spurious NPI licensing might be reduced to the E XH operator pragmatically “rescuing” the NPI, in the sense of Giannakidou (1998, 2006).

1. The cross-flow type of heat interchanger is shown diagrammatically in Fig. 1. One of the fluids involved is arranged to pass through a nest of small tubes, while the other streams past the tubes at right angles to them. To fix ideas we suppose that the tubes contain cooling water which enters at a temperature T1. The temperature of the water leaving a tube depends upon its position, but the water from all the tubes is mixed and is led to a single exit pipe in which the temperature is T2. In the same way the fluid to be cooled enters at a temperature t1 and leaves at a temperature t2. If the cooling water is not used again by being led through another nest of tubes also exposed to the fluid to be cooled, the arrangement is termed a single-pass heat interchanger.