Expletives and the Syntax and Semantics of Copy Raising

Ash Asudeh and Ida Toivonen

Abstract

Proceedings of LFG06; CSLI Publications On-line

We present an event semantics account of copy raising in Swedish and English. The examination of copy raising gives rise to two puzzles. We demonstrate that our event semantics analysis solves the two puzzles. We examine some challenging copy raising data from expletives, propose a solution for handling the data, and discuss consequences of the solution for the theory of expletives.