Raising as Sharing

Since Postal (1974), Raising-to-Object (henceforth RTO) has been much discussed in the syntactic literature. Noticing the hybrid characteristics of the RTO sentences, it is recently claimed that the RTO instantiates optional movement, with the ECM (Exceptional Case-Marking) subject being able to have a lower scope with regard to an embedded constituent. Based on the data showing that the apparent low behavior of the ECM subject is limited to a specific kind of determiners, I argue against the optional raising approach to RTO. Alternatively, I show that only when the determiner of the ECM subject is "sharable" (cf. McCawley 1993, Lin 2000), the low scope reading of the ECM subject is possible, demonstrating a parallelism between the two kinds of constructions.