7 - Raising and Control Constructions

Summary

The properties of raising and control verbs that we discuss in this chapter can be summarized as follows. Unlike a control predicate, a raising predicate does not assign a semantic role to its subject (or object). The absence of a semantic role can be used to account for the possibility of expletive it or there, or a part of an idiom, as subject or object of a raising predicate, and the impossibility of such expressions as subjects of control predicates. Among control predicates, the VP complement’s unexpressed subject is coindexed with one of the syntactic dependents. Among raising predicates, the entire syntactic-semantic value of the subject of the infinitival VP is shared with that of one of the dependents of the predicate. This ensures that whatever category is required by the raising predicate’s VP complement is the raising predicate’s subject (or object). These properties of the raising and control verbs follow naturally from their lexical specifications. In particular, the present analysis offers a systematic, construction-based account of the mismatch between the number of syntactic complements that a verb has and the number of semantic arguments that it has.