A Semantic Analysis of the Predicates that License Raised Subject Passive Constructions

The predicates like seem, appear and be likely have two types of structures: (1) “it seems/appears/is likely that NP VP” and (2) “NP seems/appears/is likely to VP.” These two structures have almost identical semantic content, because the subject noun phrase in the that-subordinate clause in structure (1) is assumed to be raised and replace the subject it in the main clause, resulting in a sentence with an infinitive clause as in (2). The same thing is observed in sentences with some passive predicates such as be considered/reported/known, and for convenience, we will distinguish between ISPC (Impersonal it Subject Passive Construction) , which has it as the subject and is followed by a that-clause, and RSPC (Raised Subject Passive Construction),which has the subject in a that-clause raised and is followed by a to-infinitive clause. After reviewing the previous studies, we will show that the number of predicate types that are listed for RSPC by Sinclair (1999) is small and extremely limited. We then propose to use BNCweb as a corpus to collect as broadly and comprehensively as possible the types of verbs that specifically license RSPC, and to classify them into eight groups based on their semantic characteristics. At the same time, we will analyze the RSPC constructions in depth, pointing out the lexical or syntactic characteristics of each group of verbs, as well as problems and points of caution in grammatical analysis. We can expect that every RSPC-licensed verb detected in the future will belong to one of the eight verb classes defined in this paper.