The Category P Features, Projections, Interpretation

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e. ha-dira kaša le-icuv TC
the-apartment difficult to-designing
“The apartment is difficult to design.”
.
Given (73), however, the question whether a tough A has an external argument
reemerges. The tough A is semantically predicated internally in (73a) but externally in
(73c). Note, that once the TC is taken into consideration, the picture becomes even
more complicated. In the TC (73e), the tough A seems to be predicated (externally) of
an individual, rather than of event.
In what follows, I will adopt the view familiar from Chomsky 1986, Browning
1987, Cinque 1990, among others, and assume that the semantic argument of the
tough As is internal, rather than external. 52 Note that following Rothstein (2001),
tough-headed APs are nevertheless inherent predicates, namely they do have an open
external slot which has to be closed by predication. With this in mind, let us return to
the TC.
5.5.1.2 The subject position: Chomsky (1981) notes that as opposed to a nonthematic
subject position, which can host idiom-chunks or expletive subjects (74), the
subject position of the TC resists them (75). That is, if the discussed position is, in
fact, a theta-position, the ungrammaticality of (75) is expected, as it involves
movement of an idiom chunk into a thematic position, which is excluded (but see
Boškovič 1994): 53
(74) a. Good care seems [ t to be taken t of the orphans]
b. There is believed [t to have been a crime committed t].
(75) a. *Good care is hard [to take t of the orphans]
52 There are alternative views: The ability to predicate either externally or internally is argued in
Hazout (1994) to be the typical property of these As in Hebrew. Kim (1996) argues for a uniform
external predication, accounting for sentences like (73a) by extraposition of a sentential argument to a
sentence-final position (but see Rothstein 2001 for arguments against such view). Note that neither the
alternative views nor the familiar one can account in a straightforward way for the non-uniform
behavior of the tough A (i.e. the grammatical (73c) as opposed to the ungrammatical (73d), but the
grammatical (73e)).
53 The thematic status of the subject position led Chomsky (1981) to propose a reanalysis of the
adjective-complement as a complex adjective. This solution is abandoned in Chomsky (1986) in favor
of the Op-movement analysis.