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Here's a paragraph from this EFL Magazine article "SUBJECT RAISING: DO YOU HAPPEN TO KNOW?" (2015):

Not long ago, most linguists believed there really was a set of processes in our brains called ‘transformations’, where words moved around inside sentences, to turn simple statements into things like questions, negatives, passives, etc. This idea seems to have fallen out of favour in modern linguistics, which feels like a shame to me – I like the idea of words whizzing around inside our brains. But whether or not it really happens in our brains, I think the image of subjects being raised to different parts of sentences is still a useful way of understanding the structure.

(Emphasis mine.)

This paragraph seems to suggest that 'raising' is an outdated concept in modern linguistics (although the author still finds it useful).

Is this true?

If so, how does 'modern linguistics' explain what is called 'raising' constructions?

EDIT

For example, doesn't HPSG do away with the concept of 'raising' altogether? I don't know if HPSG is one of the modernest linguistics theories, but it seems fairly new.

EDIT

This paper on HPSG "Lingering Challenges to the Raising to Object and Object Control Constructions" has this description of HPSG regarding example (45):

The HPSG account shares with the overt raising account the assumption that ‘Marcia’ in (1), repeated here as (45), appears in the main clause in the surface string.

(45) Cindy believes Marcia to be a genius.

It differs from the movement accounts, though, by assuming a monostratal syntax, which means that though ‘Marcia’ is the object of ‘believes’ in the phrasal syntax, it is associated with the syntactic and semantic features of the embedded predicate (‘to be a genius’) by a kind of complete phrase coindexing called structure-sharing, and not movement. In a sense, the NP ‘Marcia’ is equally associated with the main clause verb and the embedded clause verb; but in the surface string it is in the main clause.

This sounds like HPSG doesn't posit movement (or raising for that matter) to analyze (45).

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JK2
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  • The concept itself has not disappeared - it's just what triggers this phenomenon is explained differently now (feature checking). – Alex B. Mar 21 '19 at 02:43
  • @AlexB. Isn't the concept of 'raising' based on the distinction between deep structure and surface structure? Or are you saying that the concept of 'raising' is compatible with the elimination of the distinction between deep structure and surface structure? – JK2 Mar 21 '19 at 03:06
  • If you're thinking about the brain, i.e. how our minds actually process language, this paper provides pretty decisive evidence against the notion, at least in the case of topicalisation: Kristensen, L. B., Engberg-Pedersen, E., & Wallentin, M. (2014). Context predicts word order processing in Broca's region. Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 26(12), 2762-2777. In general the move is towards attributing effects of 'movement' to domain-general mechanisms instead. While strong evidence might appear someday that vindicates the concept, I wouldn't hold my breath. – WavesWashSands Mar 21 '19 at 03:36
  • With that said, 'raising' is still a cool metaphor with which to describe these sentences. If you're teaching EFL, I see no reason not to use the term. – WavesWashSands Mar 21 '19 at 03:38
  • @WavesWashSands Thanks for the interesting read. Cool metaphor as it is, I find 'raising' more an artificial trick than an inherent feature of English (or any other language for that matter). And I think that might be the reason for the occasional difficulty encountered in distinguishing 'raising' and 'non-raising' constructions. So I wonder how effective 'raising' can be in EFL let alone in linguistics. – JK2 Mar 21 '19 at 04:16
  • @WavesWashSands- Although some stages of processing language may not require [de-]movement, I expect memory to use a basic template (where pronouns and articles do not exist, and everything is case-marked in some way). – amI Mar 21 '19 at 04:30
  • @JK2: Eh, I don't think the concept of 'movement' as a cognitive notion is tenable, but I also don't have anything against ESL exercises where you turn statements into questions or join sentences with normal word order by turning one into a relative clause... The lack of cognitive reality of transformations doesn't automatically invalidate its usefulness for description and pedagogy. And all grammatical descriptions are 'artificial'. There are no such things as adjectives or interrogatives that exist in the real world; all syntactic concepts are just convenient fictions, raising or otherwise. – WavesWashSands Mar 21 '19 at 10:06
  • I'm not familiar with all the raising-related literature though, so I'm not familiar with the difficulty distinguishing raising and non-raising construction that you mention - would appreciate if you could elaborate on that. I'd point out, though, that the main 'competitor' of the term raising, accusative and infinitive, has been known to create a fair bit of confusion as well, with some authors including other constructions like I made him read the book under this umbrella and others, like Jespersen, excluding them. – WavesWashSands Mar 21 '19 at 10:11
  • If you want to see how it works, check out the Cliff's on Equi and Raising. BTW, linguists never believed that transformations occurred in the brain or the mind; they're just convenient ways to keep track of sentence types. What happens in the human brain or mind is totally dependent on the individual brain or mind and not on anything abstract like grammar. – jlawler Mar 21 '19 at 18:58
  • @jlawler Although I agree with your comment, I don't think all linguists are of the same opinion. There have definitely been attempts to 'show' that transformations occur in the brain, and the paper I mention shows important evidence against them. – WavesWashSands Mar 22 '19 at 06:21
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    Observed language data is more or less the same, it's how you analyze your data that changes with time. In generative syntax (the MP), movement still exists. – Alex B. Mar 22 '19 at 22:36
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    On the matter of why there are doubts about transformations, I agree with @jlawler, and my own opinion that there are no transformations has only to do with grammar and has nothing to do with any putative evidence about what does or doesn't happen in people's brains. – Greg Lee Mar 23 '19 at 23:01
  • @jlawler in your Cliff's on Equi and Raising (thanks for the link), you say that Bill seems to have examined Mary is equivalent to Mary seems to have been examined by Bill, just as CGEL says that he had a specialist examine his son is equivalent to he had his son examined by a specialist. I know I'm not the only one who interprets these sentences as meaning e.g. there's something about Bill that makes me think he has examined Mary. Is there some theoretical commitment that prevents linguists from accepting this reading? –  Mar 26 '19 at 03:51
  • I'd be very interested to know whether you'd say my reading is just wrong, or that the difference is a pragmatic one that doesn't affect the semantic equivalence, or what. –  Mar 26 '19 at 03:52
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    The standard test for synonymy of two sentences is logical: two sentences are synonymous if, whenever one is true, then the other one is true and whenever one is false, then the other one is false. Logic only has two "meanings": True and False. Presuppositions, entailments, implicatures, and other fine-tuned context-dependent interpretations count as pragmatics. – jlawler Mar 26 '19 at 14:32

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No, Raising is alive and well, but the conception of Raising as a transformation is moribund, because transformations are no longer accepted. So, if we believe in Raising, and Raising is a transformation, where does that leave us? In a word, confused.

Confused, but at least open to the possibility that Raising exists but is not a transformation. Well, transformational grammar is not the only theory under the sun, after all, so we should look to some other theoretical account of Raising. My favorite candidate is Relational Grammar, one of whose proponents, Paul Postal, it happens, wrote the book on Raising.

HPSG, which you mention, is a revision to GPSG, and GPSG in a certain (rather trivial) sense contains Relational Grammar, since it attributes a "GR" (Grammatical Relation) to every NP, and offers a description of Raising. However, in my opinion, these extensions of CFG (Context Free Phrase Structure Grammar) are too artificial to be true.

Thinking of Raising as an upward movement in a tree structure, I myself offered a theory here, which I called "2psg", which describes Raising as a change in grammatical relation, or obliqueness. (Construing grammatical relations as degrees of obliqueness is also found in HPSG.)

Greg Lee
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  • As far as I know, HPSG abandoned movement for structural sharing. If you've abandon movement, doesn't it mean that you've abandoned Raising as well? – JK2 Mar 22 '19 at 01:39
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    No, it doesn't mean that. As was shown in GPSG, the relationship between constructions without movement and those with movement (in TG terms) can be described completely within CFG (which has no movement mechanism). It's not obvious, I know. Perhaps you could ask a question about it? – Greg Lee Mar 22 '19 at 01:56
  • By the way, I don't know what structural sharing is. – Greg Lee Mar 22 '19 at 02:02
  • Isn't structural sharing a core concept behind HPSG? – JK2 Mar 22 '19 at 02:46
  • Please see my second edit for some evidence that HPSG doesn't involve movement, and therefore it doesn't involve raising. – JK2 Mar 22 '19 at 05:35
  • GPSG and HPSG, since they are versions of CFG, does not have movement. I thought that's what I said. But above, I've just said that that it doesn't follow that those theories don't have Raising. They do. I hope I'm being clear. Raising, yes -- transformations, no. – Greg Lee Mar 22 '19 at 07:49
  • I'm no linguist, so maybe I'm mistaken, but in a layman's view, how can you have "raising" without involving "movement"? For example, here's the very definition of 'raising' in a wiki: "In linguistics, raising constructions involve the movement of an argument from an embedded or subordinate clause to a matrix or main clause". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_(linguistics) According to this definition, if you don't have movement, you don't have 'raising'. – JK2 Mar 22 '19 at 08:11
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    @JK2: Welcome to linguistics, where terminological confusion is the norm, lol. Raising was originally proposed as a transformation mechanism, i.e. as a descriptive tool, and this seems to be the norm in older papers, but the term has since been co-opted by linguists to refer to the phenomenon rather than the descriptive tool. – WavesWashSands Mar 22 '19 at 08:40
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    Nothing of substance can ever follow from definitions in an empirical science. The Raising analysis can be expressed as a relationship between tree structures of sentences. If a tree with a verb and sentence complement is grammatical, then a certain other tree, with object and infinitive, will be grammatical. The relationship between the trees can be described by moving things around in the first tree to obtain the second tree, but it needn't necessarily be. Instead, it can be described as a relationship between the PS rules that generate the first tree and those that generate the second. – Greg Lee Mar 22 '19 at 08:57
  • @WavesWashSands When I posted the question, by 'raising' I could not have meant the phenomenon of 'raising' itself, could I? I think it's because the phenomenon cannot be a concept, much less "an outdated concept". So I guess the original concept of 'raising' is an outdated concept. – JK2 Mar 22 '19 at 08:59
  • @GregLee Can your theory accommodate a situation where the complement of a preposition becomes the subject of a verb, but the preposition does not scope over the verb, so that in a sense, the verb takes an embedded/subordinate element as subject, rather than as object? –  Mar 22 '19 at 09:19
  • @Minty, I don't think so. But please give examples so I can understand the question. It sounds interesting. – Greg Lee Mar 22 '19 at 09:50
  • @GregLee I’m not sure it happens in En, but you come across Thai sentences like because her friends helped her hide prevented the soldiers from catching her, where the subject of prevented is the complement of because, but because does not scope over prevented. –  Mar 22 '19 at 17:32
  • You can almost capture the meaning in an active En sentence by extracting the embedded subject, as in because her friends helped her hide, that (or they) prevented the soldiers from catching her - but for me these sentences are a bit marginal. You feel you want a preposition of manner not a preposition of cause. The passive equivalent because her friends helped her hide, the soldiers were prevented from catching her seems much better, but what’s the difference? –  Mar 22 '19 at 17:33
  • The understood agent is the same as in the active sentence, so it seems to be that in the active sentence it is in a direct relationship with the verb, whereas in the passive sentence it is not... but the Th active sentence is fine, suggesting that when the subject is embedded, it loses its direct connection with the verb - and there’s an obvious parallel between that and the idea that, in En, when the object is embedded, it loses its direct connection with the verb. –  Mar 22 '19 at 17:33
  • It’s as though in the En version, the notion of cause appears twice at the same logical level, whereas in the Th version, it's at different levels, once as the cause of an entire situation, and once as a cause within the situation. That’s somewhat like H&P’s observation that, in a raised object construction like this caused both of us to overlook the inconsistency, the second argument is the event as a whole. –  Mar 22 '19 at 17:34
  • @Minty, Thanks for going into detail. Perhaps in the Thai construction the equivalent of "prevent" has no grammatical subject (which is not permitted in English). I don't understand it, but I don't see any connection to Raising. – Greg Lee Mar 22 '19 at 18:21