Raising: Dutch Between English and German

Abstract

As a complement to C. B. van Haeringen's classic comparative study (1956) that positioned the grammar of Dutch in between the grammars of English and German, this study compares the productivity of three kinds of “raising” patterns in these languages: Object-to-Subject, Subject-to-Object, and Subject-to-Subject raising. It establishes the extent to which Dutch, as well as English and German, have evolved from the old West Germanic starting point these languages are assumed to have shared in this area of grammar. The results are a test case for Hawkins' (1986) case syncretism account of the difference in “explicit-ness” between the grammars of English and German.*

Dutch ('t) schijnt and german scheint(')s: on the grammaticalization of evidential particles

“…The infinitival construction is also referred to as a construction involving “(Subject‐to‐Subject) raising” (cf. van der Auwera & Noël ), which entails that in (3), the subject Jekimov has been ‘raised’ to the position of the matrix clause subject from the complement clause in the corresponding sentence with subject extraposition (i). (i)Het schijnt dat Jekimov ook gevallen is.‘It seems that Jekimov has also fallen.’ However, in order to steer clear of any transformational implications and because of Diewald's (2010) rejection of the diachronic development from complementation to raising, the term ‘infinitival’ is preferred in this paper. …”

“…The infinitival construction is also referred to as a construction involving “(Subject‐to‐Subject) raising” (cf. van der Auwera & Noël ), which entails that in (3), the subject Jekimov has been ‘raised’ to the position of the matrix clause subject from the complement clause in the corresponding sentence with subject extraposition (i).…”