RAISING AND COPY RAISING IN ENGLISH AND SERBIAN
RAISING AND COPY RAISING IN ENGLISH AND SERBIAN

Summary/Abstract: This paper looks into the phenomena of raising and copy raising verbs in English and Serbian within the generative framework. Constructions with the Serbian equivalents of the English raising verbs seem ‘činiti se’, appear ‘izgledati/delovati’ and turn out ‘izgledati/delovati’ are examined. The cases in which raising out of the clause is necessary (small clauses) and those in which raising is allowed (topicalization and contranstive focusing) are considered. It is concluded that there are no real equivalents of the English raising verbs in Serbian. However, a special raising construction is described. This construction does not show subject-verb agreement and the verb is always inflected for default third person singular neuter. As far as copy raising verbs are concerned, the situation is less clear. There is an ongoing debate about the existence of thematic and non-thematic subjects of these verbs in English. Moreover, it remains an open question whether the pronominal copy has to be the copy of the subject. In this paper, the aforementioned questions are discussed in light of Serbian equivalent constructions. The examples from Serbian show that the copy of the subject noun phrase does not appear at all. The conclusion is that copy raising verbs are generally thematic in Serbian.

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