Control vs. Raising in English. A Dependency Grammar Account

This contribution presents a dependency grammar (DG) account of control and raising in English. Due to the minimalism of DG analyses of sentence structure, the difference between control and raising cannot be captured in the syntactic structure alone. The situation forces the DG account to reach to some other aspect of dependency syntax other than the raw hierarchies of structure to account for the differences between control and raising. This other aspect is valency. Valency has, of course, been a central subtheory of dependency syntax since Tesnière (1959/2015: Book D). By augmenting the valency frames of predicates to distinguish between valents that are and are not semantic arguments of the predicate at hand, the differences between control and raising can be acknowledged and accommodated. 1 Control vs. raising The distinction between control and raising predicates in English and related languages is well established. These two types of predicates have a combinatory potential that appears to be essentially the same at first blush, e.g. (1) a. Sam preferred to stop. b. Sam seemed to stop. The control predicate preferred and the raising predicate seemed both combine with a to-infinitive. This similarity obscures the fact that there are important differences in how the two behave semantically. Consider in this regard that many DGs would produce structural analyses of these two sentences that are hierarchically the same, e.g.