On English Raising Verbs

Nowadays, Raising and Control more and more attract theorists' attention. This thesis focuses on the syntactic analysis of the raising verb under raising construction in GB. To start with, some theories that closely relate with the raising verb are introduced at the very beginning of this thesis. These theories are theta theory, case theory, X-bar theory and the NP movement operation. After that, this thesis illustrates the definition and classification of raising verbs. The verbs like seem, appear, happen, turn out which raise a component of a lower clause into a higher clause are called raising verbs. According to the characteristic of the raising verb, it can be classified into two parts: one is the subject-to-subject raising verb, like seem, appear and happen; the other the subject-to-object raising verb, like believe, imagine and prefer. There are also some arguments about some other raising verbs. These verbs, such as begin, promise, and want, etc. behave like raising verbs in raising situations, but not in other situations. Body of this thesis is the analysis of the features of raising verbs. The features analyzed here are: 1. the grammatical property of seem; 2. not assign its subject theta roles; 3. relations with dummy subject it and there; 4. not assign its subject structural case; 5. no passive forms in raising construction. Then, to get a better and clearer understanding of the raising verb and differ it with the control verb and the passive verb, comparisons are also made between the raising verb and the two types of verb. The differences between the raising verb and the control verb are: 1. the differences of the thematic role assignment; 2. the differences of the passive form in the embedded clause; 3. the differences of the selectional restriction; 4. the differences of the relation with dummy subject it and there. The similarities between the raising verb and the passive verb are: 1. the similarity of the thematic role assignment; 2. the similarity of the structural case assignment.