A Resource-Sensitive Semantics for Equi and Raising

Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) analyses of equi and raising involve functional control equations, which structure-share the values of grammatical functions, making them token-identical at the level of f(unctional)-structure. Glue semantics for LFG works from f-structure and is resource-sensitive. This seems at first to be incompatible with structure-sharing. It is demonstrated that this is not so. By using LFG’s parallel projection architecture, the Glue analysis of equi proposed here treats the clausal equi complement as denoting a property, which has been argued for on independent grounds by Chierchia (1984). It is also shown that the same approach can provide an analysis of raising in which clausal complements of raising verbs denote propositions, as required. The analysis also explains the ability of raising verbs to take expletive subjects and the inability of equi verbs to do so.

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