Raising (linguistics)

In linguistics, raising constructions involve the movement of an argument from an embedded or subordinate clause to a matrix or main clause; in other words, a raising predicate/verb appears with a syntactic argument that is not its semantic argument, but is rather the semantic argument of an embedded predicate. Although English has raising constructions, not all languages do. The term raising has its origins in the transformational analysis of such constructions; the constituent in question is seen as being "raised" from its initial, deep structure position as the subject of the embedded predicate to its surface structure position in the matrix predicate/verb. Raising predicates/verbs are related to control predicates, although there are important differences between the two predicate/verb types.