A Corpus Investigation of English Raising Constructions

Raising has been one of the hottest topics in syntactic literature, and it is well known that NP/DP-movements are involved in raising constructions. The goal of this paper is to explore the real corpus data in order to examine the actual syntactic distributions of English raising constructions. For this purpose, this paper uses Penn Treebank to extract and analyze raising constructions in English. Through the close examinations of the real corpus data, the following three facts are found on raising constructions. First, native speakers frequently use raising constructions than we might guess. Second, subject raising constructions are more frequent than object raising/ECM constructions. Third, native speakers use more raising constructions in the written texts than in spoken texts.