Raising (linguistics) - Raising Vs. Control

Raising Vs. Control

An understanding of raising is significantly expanded by comparing and contrasting raising with control. Examine the following (dependency) trees:

The a-trees contain the raising predicates wants and judges, whereas the b-trees contain the control predicates told and asked. Despite the fact that structures assumed for these different predicate types are essentially the same, there is a major distinction to be drawn. This distinction is that the control predicates semantically select their objects, whereas the raising predicates do not. In other words, the object is a semantic argument of the control predicate in each case, whereas it is not an argument of the raising predicate. This situation obtains despite the fact that both predicate types take the object to be the "subject" of the lower predicate.

The distinction between raising-to-object and control predicates is identified using the there-insertion diagnostic. Expletive there can appear as the object (or subject) of raising predicates, but it cannot appear as the object of control predicates, e.g.:

a. Sam judges there to be a problem.

b. *Sam asked there to be a problem.

a. We want there to be a revision.

b. ??We helped there (to) be a revision.

Since the raising predicates place no semantic restrictions on their object dependents, expletive there is free to appear. In contrast, object control predicates do place semantic restrictions on their object arguments, which means expletive there usually cannot appear.