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In this paper, we argue that predicates of the Tough-class in French embed not a verbal infinitive but rather, a gerundive verbal noun. This hypothesis allows us to capture a number of unexpected restrictions on French Tough-movement discussed by Legendre (1986). We show that these restrictions are best described as the inability of French Tough-movement infinitives to be followed by complements that are disallowed in their corresponding argument-taking event nominals. Our analysis of such infinitives as nominalized elements correctly predicts that they should never be selected by auxiliaries, and that they should have suppressed external arguments in the sense of Grimshaw (1990). French Tough-movement constructions are further argued to be closely related to the type of English gerund Huddleston (1971), Hantson (1984) and Clark (1985) call 'retroactive gerunds'. Like French Tough-movement constructions, English retroactive gerunds contain a gap, are possible only with a restricted class of predicates, do not license unbounded dependencies, and do not allow subjects, except when they are realized as by-phrases.

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Cinque (2002) examines those transparency effects that have been claimed to point to the existence of restructuring in French and concludes that quantifier and adverb climbing depend not on restructuring but, rather, on an irrealis context. In this paper, we show that restructuring does not play an active role in explaining the existence of en ‘of-it’ and y ‘there’ climbing or long movement in ‘easy-to-please’ constructions either, which leads to the conclusion that Modern French has no transparency effects of the restructuring kind. We then present arguments against Cinque’s (2004) thesis that verbs of the restructuring class are universally functional verbs. Instead, we adopt the Cinque (2001)/Cardinaletti & Shlonsky (2004) approach according to which restructuring verbs can be merged either as lexical or functional verbs. We argue that this approach should be parameterized to yield three options that account for the cross-dialectal/linguistic variation associated with restructuring.