What Changes in a Sentence When We Swap Verbs? Raising vs. Control Verbs
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 3 พ.ย. 2015
- How does a sentence's structure change when you swap one word for another? How can we know what those changes are? In this week's episode, we talk about raising and control verbs: what they are, how we can tell that they're different, and what they can tell us about how syntax works.
This is Topic #52!
This week's tag language: Igbo!
Last episode:
Future Tense: • What Makes a Sentence ...
Other of our syntax videos:
Referential Treatment - Binding Theory: • Binding Theory and Int...
Goldilocks and the Three Nouns - Theta Theory: • Theta Roles
Trace Evidence - Syntactic Movement: • Syntactic Movement and...
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Sources:
If you want to know more about this sort of syntactic analysis, we recommend Andrew Carnie's Syntax: A Generative Introduction. It's a pretty good setup!
Looking forward to next week!
Loved the Stanley Parable theme in this episode. I was actually captivated waiting to see what example sentence would come next, and I appreciated the "we've only told you half the parable" part.
+Sekai Kyoretsuna Thanks! I've only been able to watch Let's Play videos of it (first person games tend to make me nauseous), but I really appreciated storytelling in it, and Stephan (who drafted the episode) is a big fan. It was fun to put together. ^_^
U r literally the BEST LINGUISTICS TEACHER ever!!!! U've no idea how much u have helped me with my studies
You, sir, are fantastic. This satisfies both my nerdiness and my weird obsession with random knowledge. You have gained a subscriber.
+Learn German with Herr Antrim Thanks! Glad you liked it. We were definitely happy with how this one turned out. Hope you like more of our stuff in the future. ^_^
love you guys so much please keep up the great work
Thanks! This helps me a lot with my Minimalism Syntax class.
Saving my life before descriptive grammar test. 9:22 to explain whole classes, you are great!
Great! Glad to be able to help clear things up. Good luck! ^_^
He saved me too!!
why can't you be my syntax teacher??? :(
Well done and very clearly explained!!!
Thanks so much! ^_^
Thank you so much!
great video!!
Thanks! Really useful for university!
Man, I love you! You´ve saved me! Now I feel ready for my next exam. Cheers!
Glad to be able to help out! Thanks for watching. ^_^
Just a little question. In 3:51 you give and example of a sentence. Isn´t "to" supposed to be below the "C" category? I think it acts more like a complementizer rather than an inflection... Sorry If I´m wrong but I´m brand new at this...
So basically, the "to" part there is the infinitive tense in English; it's what tells us that the verb doesn't have some other tense. In X' Theory, elements associated with tense go in I, so that's why we put the "to" there. Hope that makes sense! ^_^
THis was awesooome!
+Dustin Johnston Thanks! Glad you liked it. ^_^
Great video, as always. I can really see how the silent pronoun works because I know that in Romanian, a sentence like "I want to speak" would come out as "Eu vreau să vorbesc," which literally means "I want that I speak," and it reveals the following pattern: "Eu vreau să vorbești" "I want you to speak" (lit. I want that you speak) and "Eu vreau Moti să vorbească" "I want Moti to speak" (lit. I want that Moti speak) Essentially, instead of an infinitive, Romanian employs a conjugated subjunctive verb in the subordinate clause, wherein the silent pronoun manifests as a (possibly) dropped subject that accordingly elicits the mentioned conjugation, which thereby clearly evidences the existence of a silent pronoun.
+Andy Ding That's a really great example! Thanks for sharing that. I didn't know that about Romanian. ^_^
The Ling Space ^__^ thank u for taking the time to make these great videos and reply to ur commentators on top of that
+Andy Ding Sure! Getting to talk with people about language stuff is the best. ^_^
Thanks for this awesome vid! Loved the examples. However, I have a question that I hope you don't mind me asking...
Why do you have a CP in a raising predicate? Raising is argument movement from one TP (you use IP for this, right?) into the next, there isn't a CP for the subj trace or else it would have been able to undergo clefting:
*[To have fallen far from the tree] the apple seems.
Can you explain how raising sentences can be analysed within a transformational approach?
thanx man
Hi Moti, Englishmen here interested in linguistics, Have I got this right? Raising verb can use dummy subjects i.e "It appears Stanley is alone" whereas control verbs can't and so must use PRO as the subject such as "I wanted to eat that !". I think I've grasped object control verbs in which the 'object' does the second action "I want you to go" but I can't think of any object raising verbs, is "There seems to be a mosquito" one?
As an additional question are verbless clause and small clause one and the same? if not, why not?
So if we make a null subject construction of the sentence as "It seems Stanley is alone.", then choose to replace the null subject "It" with "Stanely", we get "Stanley seems to be alone."
Does "is" change back to the infinitive "to be" because it's no longer directly connected to Stanley further down the tree? Or does this go back to the cinema rule where it can only look further ahead?
+JqlGirl Thanks for the question! This is actually a pretty interesting question. Okay, so basically, this has to do with a difference between tensed and non-tensed clauses. A clause that has tense requires that there be an overt, pronounced subject, whereas a non-tensed is fine with not having anything overt there. That's why they can have a trace or a silent pronoun like PRO as a subject.
So when we're in the second sentence, and the sentence is "Seems Stanley to be alone", Stanley needs to move up out of the lower clause to be the subject of the higher clause, because something needs to be before "seems," and Stanley isn't really capable of staying in its original position. The non-tensed verb in the lower clause can't really support Stanley, and the upper one can, so Stanley moves on up.
Essentially, when we have "It seems Stanley is alone," the lower clause verb is tensed, and so it requires an overt subject. Stanley then has to stay down there! And then we stick the "it" into the top clause so that there's a subject there, too. But when the bottom verb is the non-tensed "to be," Stanley can go up and be the subject of the top sentence; it can't really stay below any longer. Tensed verbs need overt subjects, and barring a few exceptional cases, overt subjects need tensed verbs. And so that's why we switched the tense around.
Hope this makes sense! ^_^
what is explained here, is that the same as the phenomenon: verb raising??
What kind of verb is "Hope"? Is it an ECM or a raising verb?
Daiana Acero subject control :)
In terms of case theory why this sentence is ungrammatical "he believes to understand the explanation" ??
You pronounced "fruit" as "fert", is this a dialectal thing? I haven't noticed it before.
+Pakanahymni Huh! I feel like I don't usually do that, but that in rapid speech, sometimes that vowel does just become a rhotacized schwa. Interesting! I'll keep an eye out for this more in the future. ^_^