English copy raising constructions: Argument realization and characterization condition

Together with raising constructions, English employs the so-called copy raising (CR) constructions. The traditional wisdom for the treatment of these CR constructions has been that the subject of the highest embedded clause governed by the CR verb is raised to the matrix subject, leaving behind a coreferential pronoun (pronominal copy) in the subject position. This kind of movement-based analysis raises both empirical and analytical issues, when considering great variations in the position of the pronominal copy. This paper shows that copy raising predicates are basically classified into two main types, genuine and perception ones, while displaying similarities as well as distinctive properties. Together with the augmentation of empirical data through extensive corpus search, the paper further suggests that the similarities and differences of these two types as well as the variations of the CR construction can be followed from tight interactions among the lexical properties of these two types organized in a hierarchical structure, constraints on the argument realization specifying how the arguments are mapped on syntactic and semantic elements, and characterization constraints on the CR construction involved.