Re: Raising and Equi-verbs: a birds eye overview

taliesin the storyteller wrote:
> Basically, there are verbs that take can take subclauses as arguments,
> here are two, seem and try:
>
>     1) "David seemed to leave"
>     2) "David tried to leave"
>
> The first is a raising-verb, the second is an equi-verb. Ways to
> test for the difference is eg. to try to rewrite the sentences:
>
>     a) By replacing the subject by "it" or "there" (aka. "empty
>        subjects" or "expletive pronouns") and keep the meaning
>
>         1) "It seemed that David left"
>         2) "*It tried that David left"
Okay, raising verbs make sense, but I would've expected them to be some
odd peculiarity of English (or Germanic languages in general). Is it
really the case that all languages have them? Are there no languages
that express this idea as "David apparently left", without having a
troublesome verb like "seem"?

But I don't get what "equi-verbs" are supposed to be, unless it's
"something that looks like a raising verb but isn't".

>     b) By giving both verbs in the sentence the same overt (visible,
>        explicit) subject and use a conjunction
>
>         1) "*David seemed and David left"
>         2) "David tried and David left"
Isn't the difference in this case just the fact that "tried" can be used
without an object (like "ate"), but "seemed" requires an object?
Certainly "David tried and David left" doesn't mean the same thing as
"David tried to leave", so the only thing this shows is that "try" and
"seem" can't be used in the same contexts.

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