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Raising verbs

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A raising verb is a verb, such as English seem, in which the apparent subject can be analysed as having been moved or ‘raised’ from post-verbal position. This is most obvious in sentences such as (1).

(1)       There seems to be a problem.

Here the expletive subject there is plausibly analysed as being the subject of be rather than seem, as it is in both the simple sentence (2) below and the more complex sentence (3):

(2)       There is a problem.

(3)       We didn’t expect there to be a problem.

If this is correct, then there in (1) has raised from subject position in the embedded clause to subject position in the main clause, as shown in (4) below (where the strikethrough font shows the initial merge site for there):

(4)       There seems there to be a problem.

Extending this analysis to sentences such as John seems happy, we have the following:

(5)       John seems John happy.

Underlying this entire analytical paradigm is the assumption that seem (and raising verbs generally) does not assign (or, more technically, θ-mark) a subject itself.