(57) shows three other types of Head Constraint violations.
(57) a.John is easy [to please]
b. [A picture] is hanging on the wall [of a famous movie actor].
c. John put [the blame for the accident] on Bill.In (57a),Johnis a semantic argument ofpleasebut not its syntactic object. This construction resembles the“raising”
construction (54), in that it is licensed by particular words such aseasy, tough, andfun. It also has some of the character
of a long-distance dependency, in that the position fro mwhichJohnreceives its semantic role can be more deeply
embedded:
(58) John is easy [to get people [to dislike∧]].(57b)is a case wherean argument or modifier ofan NP has been displaced totheendoftheclause ofwhichtheNP is
anargument.Unlikeanyoftheprevious displacements, thisoneisevidentlymotivatedonthesortofprosodicgrounds
withwhichwe became familiar in section 5.4: noticethat (57b) sounds much better thanA picture was hanging on the wall
[of me], where the displaced phrase is too short to be prosodically appropriate at the end.
(57c) is a case of the so-called“light verb”construction.Johnis doing the blaming, andBillis being blamed, but, in
violationoftheHeadConstraint,neitherisintheNP headed byblame. Inthisconstruction, a verblikeput, take, give, get,
make,orhaveis combined with a nominal that denotes an event or action, and the two together create a shared
argument structure. In (57c), for instance, the argument structure is determined by neitherputnorblame, but by the
complexput the blame(e.g. Jackendoff 1974; Grimshaw and Mester 1988). In some languages such as Japanese and
Korean, light verb constructions run rampant: a large proportion of English verbs translate into a light verb plus a
nominal (see further remarks in section 8.10).
Inclassical generativegrammar, wayshavebeensought totreat eachoftheconstructions in(57) as satisfyingtheHead
Constraint in D(eep) Structure, and to produce the surface for mby so me sort of move ment or deletion. In
nonderivationaltheories theyare regarded as directviolationsof theHead Constraint,in whichtheoffending phrase is
linked in a non-canonical way to its semantic role. Whichever way they are accounted for, each of these types of
violation of the Head Constraint is amply attested in the languages of the world.