On raising in Tagalog

This article focuses on so-called ‘raising’ constructions in Tagalog, an Austronesian language, and compares them with more familiar raising constructions in languages like English. It is shown that there are interesting differences between English-type raising and its Tagalog-type counterpart. It is argued following Maclachlan (1996) that the differences in question are due to the (non)availability of null operator movement in ‘raising’ contexts (cf. Massam, 1985). They can be accounted for in terms of feature movement (Chomsky, 1995; Takahashi, 1997) within the principles-and-parameters approach where it is claimed that parametric variation is reducible to lexical properties (in the case at hand, those of tense/aspect-related functional categories).