Lingering Challenges to the Raising‐to‐object and Object‐control Constructions

.  This article provides an overview of the three main approaches to raising-to-object sentences like Cindy believes Marcia to be a genius. The article describes the strengths and challenges faced by these accounts, reaching a number of conclusions. First, the covert ‘‘LF’’ raising account, though successful at accounting for certain interpretational facts about the construction, does not provide an analysis of the word-order facts. Second, the overt raising account, which can account for the word order facts, still faces two main challenges; there remain important open questions about verb placement, and though none of the current approaches to extraction can easily explain it, extraction and raising-to-object interact in complex ways that are still not well understood. Third, the movement theory of control, which treats object control in a way parallel to overt raising-to-object, faces not only the challenges to the overt raising account, but several others particular to object control. Finally, the article describes the HPSG analysis of raising-to-object, which can account straightforwardly for the word order facts, and with the appropriate constraints can be extended to account for the extraction facts discussed.