English Raising Constructions and Their Korean Translations

This paper was to investigate subject-to-subject [SS] raising and subject-to-object [SO] raising constructions in English as well as the linguistic factors which affect the Korean translations of the raising constructions. This study mainly discussed four main concerns. First, there is difference in the markedness of the raising depending on the SS or SO raising in terms of the frequency of tokens in English and Korean. Second, SS raising constructions in both languages are prominently used for the topicality of the raised subject, and the topicality in the SS raising is reflected in the Korean translations by the choice of the topic marker or nominative marker. However, the topicality in the SO raising in English is not clearly reflected by the SO raising in the Korean translations. Third, it is claimed that the modality predicates in English induce much more SS raising than their corresponding non-raising construction. In the translated version, almost all instances of the SS raising are translated with the raising construction in Korean. Fourth, the SO raising in the translations are conditioned by the feature of contrastive meaning.