: LFG and the history of raising verbs 1 LFG and the history of raising verbs

Grammaticalisation has traditionally been seen as a process which involves “semantic bleaching” and a process whereby lexical items become grammatical morphemes. Whilst this concept is understandable intuitively it is not clear why meaning shift should affect syntactic structure to any degree. In this paper I explore whether a lexically based theory of syntax such as LFG is able to account for these parallel processes. Drawing on the particular syntactic properties of so-called “subject-to-subject raising verbs” I develop an account of how these predicates have arisen historically from predicates with full argument structure and show how one notion of semantic bleaching may correspond to the historical dissociation of function and theta-role. This will in turn affect the syntactic representation of these predicates. Using the parallel levels of representation of the LFG framework I postulate that the one-to-one mappings of concepts to grammatical functions through the media of Sem(antic)-structure, Arg(ument)-structure and G(rammatical) F(unctional)structure may become shifted through suppression, caused either by productive morphosyntactic processes or historic reanalysis. For example, a perception verb may become a “raising verb” if three conditions apply: i) the presence of secondary predication; ii) suppression of the perceiver argument though detransitivisation; (iii) cognitive shift from a physical to a mental process. This results in the dissociation of the subject function from its originally assigned theta-role. 0. Introduction Much has been written about raising verbs and how to account for them and represent them in various theoretical frameworks. At an pretheoretical level we can say that in sentences like: (1) Leo seems to prefer red wine (2) Clio is believed to have lied about that the subjects of the matrix verbs seem and believe, which are Leo and Clio respectively, have no semantic relation to those verbs, but rather are associated with the verb of the embedded clause. This is illustrated by their possible paraphrases: (3) It seems that Leo prefers red wine (4) It is believed that Clio lied about that Put more formally, we say that predicates like seem do not assign a theta-role to their subject. Accounts are offered in most frameworks to explain how the subject of the embedded predicate ends up as the superficial subject of the matrix verb: in Relational Grammar (Postal 1974) it is known as subject-to-subject raising (within a general notion of ‘ascension’) and is motivated by the Final 1 Law, i.e. the rule that (in English) all clauses must ultimately have a subject; in Government and Binding Theory (Chomsky 1981) it is an instance of NP movement and is ‘Casedriven’, i.e. the subject NP has to move in order to acquire Case. The following kind of derivational structure would be posited to the sentence in (1): (5) [ e seem [ Leo to prefer red wine ] ] In LFG, the phenomenon is treated as a one of functional identity at the level of f-structure. Seem states in its lexical entry that it subcategorises for an XCOMP to which it does assign a theta-role and a subject function, to which it doesn’t, represented as: (6) (↑PRED) = ‘SEEM <(XCOMP)> (SUBJ)’ (Bresnan 1982:377) 1 I am grateful to Nigel Vincent, Kersti Borjars and the participants at LFG97 in San Diego for their very helpful comments on this paper. LFG97 J. Barron: LFG and the history of raising verbs 3 The subject is identical to the subject of its complement clause by the mechanism of functional control, the statement of which is found in the lexical entry of the verb: (7) (↑SUBJ) = (↑XCOMP SUBJ) So, a representation of sentence (1) would be: (8) SUBJ [PRED ‘Leo’]