John ate vs John is too stubborn to talk to

Solution 1:

We are offered the following sentences:

John ate an apple.

John ate.

The second is just the first with the direct object removed.

Then we are shown the following:

John is too stubborn to talk to Bill.

John is too stubborn to talk to.

Chomsky wants us to drop 'Bill'. He says this is analogous to dropping 'an apple' in his first example. However it is not. Chomsky is playing a trick on us.

The reason is that 'Bill' (unlike the apple) is not a direct object. We should instead drop 'to Bill'.

Then we would have:

John is too stubborn to talk to Bill.
John is too stubborn to talk.

That causes no problems and doesn't change the basic parsing of the sentence any more than we had to change the parse in the apple scenario.

So, what happens when we fall for the Chomsky trick? We leave the 'to' in place and orphan it by removing the very thing it refers to. Now we have to find something else for it to refer to. There is only one possibility and that is John.

Now we simply parse the sentence differently and give it the new meaning.

Note

How the new version of the sentence is parsed may be tricky but it is a completely different question and has nothing to do with the apple scenario. Nor does it have any grammatical relationship with the "John is too stubborn to talk to Bill" sentence. The two sentences just have a lot of vocabulary in common.