Syntactic Diagnosing Of The Subject-to-Subject Raising Verb

Within the framework of Minimalist Program of Chomsky, this thesis attempts to make a further study of the syntactic and semantic features of the subject-to-subject (s-to-s) raising verb and its syntactic diagnostics. Raising structures in English involve a complex interplay between syntax, semantics and the lexicon, and thus provide an invaluable source of data with which the testing of some theories and principles of grammar can be moved forward a single step.First of all, the thesis makes a brief introduction to raising verbs, s-to-s raising verbs and existing diagnostics of s-to-s raising verbs and then the thesis discusses limitations of the diagnostics and the corresponding solutions on the basis of the design syntactic and semantic features of s-to-s raising verbs.This thesis focuses on the researches on raising verbs and raising structures at home and abroad. And we no longer analyze the syntactic and semantic features of s-to-s raising verbs only but make a study on the problems of the existing diagnostics on the basis of those features. Based on the discussion, we attempt to figure out approaches to those problems and put forward much more reasonable diagnostics. In order to explain and analyze the design features and problems, the theories of Theta, Case, Binding and NP movement have been adopted. In this thesis, the complement of raising structures is analyzed as a small clause (SC) because the SC analysis can take different kinds of complements of raising structures into consideration and reach a unified explanation. This SC is composed of a NP and a VP which is headed by a verb which must be in its original form because of the function of the infinitive symbol to. And this NP, subject of the lower clause, is assigned a theta role in the SC and then moves up to become the subject of the higher clause to satisfy the requirement of the EPP and to check its case feature. Besides, this thesis discusses the problems of the existing diagnostics. One is the semantic-relying traditional feature diagnostic which testifies the five design features of the s-to-s raising verb one by one. This diagnostic does not accord with the Economy Principle of MP for its five steps. What’s more, the syntactic role of the expletive there/it is still a controversial question and the derivation has not reached a uniform explanation in academic field. The second diagnostic is the focalization diagnostic which is on account of the TP analysis of the complement clause. As we analyze the complement clause as a SC so it is quite necessary for us to take a new look at this diagnostic to see whether it still works in diagnosing s-to-s raising verbs.At last, the thesis attempts to probe possible approaches to the existing problems of the diagnostics and to dig out much more reasonable and more persuasive diagnostics which combine semantics and syntax.