The alternation between “raising” and impersonal constructions with sembrare: a usage-based approach

Traditionally, scholars have claimed that the raising construction with sembrare ‘seem’ (sembrare+infinitive) is truth-conditionally equivalent to the impersonal construction sembra che ‘it seems that’. In contrast with this point of view, and following a Construction Grammar approach, we hypothesize that this alternation is motivated by differences in the functional properties of the alternating constructions. To test this hypothesis, we focused on selection properties, with the view of assessing whether any subject could be a good candidate to appear in the constructions under exam. We extracted occurrences of the two constructions from written and spoken Italian corpora, and coded their subjects for several formal and functional variables (length, animacy, accessibility, and type of anaphoric link). Our analysis showed that there are, in fact, differences in the selection of the subjects, and that such differences reveal functional discrepancies between the two constructions. Furthermore, we found that the presence of the experiencer can constrain the semantic contexts in which sembra che appears. These results suggest the relevance of the concept of “allostruction” to account for the behaviour of alternating constructions.