The Development of Theoretical Approaches to Raising and Control

This chapter introduces the development of theoretical approaches to raising and control. The first part introduces the major sentence structures that raising and control focuses on, and analyzes the remarkable differences between raising and control constructions in terms of thematic roles, embedded passives, selectional restrictions, pleonastic subjects, idiom chunks, etc. From the perspective of diachronic development, the second part presents the main arguments and evidence in theoretical approaches to raising and control, dwelling on its development process from the Standard Theory to the Minimalist Program. Finally, this chapter points out that the analyses face challenges from such empirical evidences as copy-raising phenomenon in English, and that theoretical approaches to raising and control have influenced or been influenced by other syntactic theories to varying degrees.