Copy raising as a lexical rule

The paper argues that there is compelling evidence for analyzing copy raising in English as a lexical rule that converts a subtype of perception verb with a stimulus subject (so-called “flip-perception” verbs) into a semantically bleached verb of mild evidentiary force, roughly equivalent to seem in some uses, which identifies the index of its external argument with the index of the pronominally expressed external argument of its complement.

Perception verbs, copy raising, and evidentiality in Swedish and English

The Germanic languages have a number of different verbs of perception such as ‘see’, ‘hear’, and ‘look like’, and these verbs can appear in different syntactic frames. The literature on these verbs point to many similarities and also interesting and subtle differences between verbs and constructions. This chapter specifically focuses on English ‘look like’ and its Swedish counterpart ‘se ut som’. Specifically, copy-raising examples like ‘Mia looked like she was sleeping’ are compared to expletive examples such as ‘It looked like Mia was sleeping’. A comparison between new psycholinguistic study of Swedish and similar recent studies on Swedish and English lends support to the hypothesis that copy-raising and expletive examples are more similar to each other in English than they are in Swedish: in Swedish the embedded pronoun is less likely to be interpreted as co-referential with the matrix subject.

Taking it up a level: Copy-raising and cascaded tiers of morphosyntactic change

This paper uncovers evidence for two linked levels of morphosyntactic change occurring in Canadian English. The more ordinary is a lexical replacement: with finite subordination after seem, the complementizer like has been overtaking all the alternatives (as if, as though, that, and Ø). On top of this, there is a broader syntactic change whereby the entire finite structure (now represented primarily by like) is beginning to catch on at the expense of infinitival subordination after seem. Drawing on complementary evidence from British English and several partial precedents in the historical linguistics literature, I take this correlation to mean that like has reached sufficient rates among the finite strategy to have instigated the second level of change, to the point that it has ramifications for epistemic and evidential marking with the verb seem. I propose that the best model of these trajectories is a set of increasingly large envelopes of variation, one inside the next, and argue that the envelope might itself be an entity susceptible to change over time.

Copy Raising in English, German, and Dutch: Synchrony and Diachrony

This study discusses copy raising in English, German, and Dutch from both a synchronic and diachronic perspective. Synchronically, copy raising has the same purpose in all three languages: to mark direct evidence. However, the languages differ in whether they allow their ‘seem’-verbs to appear in copy-raised constructions: English seem can copy raise, German scheinen cannot, whereas the status of Dutch lijken is undecided. This difference is explained by the diachronic development of these verbs: English seem has developed the furthest along the grammaticalization cline of ‘seem’-verbs, German scheinen is the most conservative in its development, and Dutch lijken has developed quite late, but is quickly catching up to English seem. Even though it is too early to tell, this distribution hints at a Van Haeringen pattern.*

When Richard met CG: reference-point and English copy-raising

abstractThe aim of this paper is to develop a Cognitive Grammar-based analysis of English Copy-raising (CR) constructions such as Richard seems like he is dancing. We argue that the notion of reference-point plays a crucial role in licensing the matrix-subject of the construction. In CR, with the epistemic verbs seem and appear, the matrix-subject functions as a reference-point in relation to the pronominal copy (if a copy exists) in the embedded clause. The aboutness topicality of the matrix-subject in CR is expected, owing to its reference-point property. The epistemic CR construction is acceptable without a pronominal copy if the matrix-subject functions as a reference-point in relation to the complement clause. The same type of analysis is applied to the CR construction with perceptual resemblance (PR) verbs – sound, look, feel, and smell – leading to the conclusion that the strong dichotomy between epistemic and PR verbs is illusory. It is further demonstrated that expletive there-raising in CR is motivated by the same reference-point phenomenon. The difference between there-raising and other CR examples stems from the role of there as a setting subject. Our reference-point-based analysis predicts a metonymic interpretation of the matrix-subject, which we attribute to the connection between reference-point and metonymy.

RAISING AND COPY RAISING IN ENGLISH AND SERBIAN

Ovaj rad se bavi fenomenom glagola podizanja, kao i fenomenom glagola podizanja koji ostavljaju kopiju imeničke fraze u engleskom i srpskom jeziku, pre svega sa stanovišta generativnog pristupa. Ispituju se konstrukcije sa srpskim ekvivalentima engleskih glagola seem ‘činiti se’, appear ‘izgledati/delovati’ i turn out ‘ispostaviti se’. Razmatraju se određeni slučajevi u kojima je podizanje imeničke fraze u srpskom jeziku neophodno (male klauze) i dozvoljeno (tematizacija i fokus, mada se dolazi do zaključka da pravi ekvivalenti engleskim glagolima podizanja u srpskom jeziku ne postoje. Ipak, opisuje se posebna konstrukcija podizanja u kojoj ne dolazi do slaganja subjekta sa glagolom. Glagol u ovoj konstrukciji uvek ima nastavak za treće lice jednine srednjeg roda. Što se tiče glagola podizanja koji ostavljaju kopiju imeničke fraze, kod njih je situacija manje jasna. U engleskom jeziku i dalje postoji debata oko postojanja tematskih i netematskih subjekata kod ove vrste glagola. Takođe, postavlja se pitanje da li zamenica koja predstavlja kopiju imeničke fraze mora biti kopija subjekta. U radu se pomenuta pitanja ispituju na primerima ekvivalentnih konstrukcija ovih glagola u srpskom jeziku. Primeri iz srpskog pokazuju da se kopija imeničke fraze uopšte ne javlja. Zaključak je da su ovi glagoli uglavnom tematski u srpskom jeziku.