English Raising Predicates and (Non-)Finite Clauses

Inthis paper, we present a diachronic and synchronic analysis of raising andextraposition constructions in the historical Brown Corpus and the more contemporary English Web Corpus 2015 .We begin by establishing two diachronic facts: first, raising constructions areused much more frequently than their semantically equivalent extrapositionvariants, and second, the distribution of raising and extraposition remains –rather exceptionally in comparison to other structures allowing forfinite/non-finite variation – diachronically consistent from the beginning ofthe 20th century to 2015. We then supplement this unique diachronicdistribution with an analysis of the most recent corpus data, which shows thatthe choice between the two semantically equivalent constructions is governed bydistinct structural factors unique to each construction. Concretely, we showthat the raising construction is frequently used as a relative clause, whereasthe extraposition variant generally resists such a syntactic role. By contrast,we show that a prominent factor in favour of extraposition relates to thenegative marker, which is placed with similar frequency both in the matrix andin the embedded clause of the extraposition construction in contrast to theraising variant, which uses the negative marker almost exclusively in thematrix clause. Lastly, we show that extraposition constructions contain modalverbs in the matrix clause more frequently than the raising variants and we tiethis observation to the idea that the clausal composition of the extrapositionconstruction is structurally more suited for expressing tentativeness.