ESL/EFL ISSUES WITH THE
“EASY-TO-PLEASE” CONSTRUCTION
We know of no published work on raising based on an examination of a large corpus of utterances that can provide an explanation of native-speaker choice between the basic and the derived forms. It may be that relative focus is the key distinction here, just as it appears to be where raising occurs in seem-type structures. An unpublished study by Terry Santos does indicate that nonnative speaker tend to disprefer raising to subject in cases where native speaker would raise an NP. Consider the following example (adapted from Time 4/27/98,p.33):