Raising: Dutch Between English and German

Abstract

As a complement to C. B. van Haeringen's classic comparative study (1956) that positioned the grammar of Dutch in between the grammars of English and German, this study compares the productivity of three kinds of “raising” patterns in these languages: Object-to-Subject, Subject-to-Object, and Subject-to-Subject raising. It establishes the extent to which Dutch, as well as English and German, have evolved from the old West Germanic starting point these languages are assumed to have shared in this area of grammar. The results are a test case for Hawkins' (1986) case syncretism account of the difference in “explicit-ness” between the grammars of English and German.*