Two Afrikaans sentences can look almost identical and yet be built on completely different machinery. Hy blyk gelukkig te wees ("he seems to be happy") and Hy probeer om gelukkig te wees ("he tries to be happy") both have a subject, a verb, and an infinitive — but the relationship between that subject and that verb is opposite in the two cases. The first is a raising construction; the second is control. This page is about that contrast. It assumes you already know the basic om te-clause from om te-clauses; what we add here is the deep structural distinction that explains why a small set of verbs — blyk, skyn, lyk, voorkom — behave unlike probeer, belowe, weier in ways that go far beyond meaning.
The core distinction in one idea
Ask a single question of the surface subject: does the main verb assign it a role, or merely host it?
A control verb like probeer (try) genuinely involves its subject in an action. If Sy probeer om te slaap ("she tries to sleep"), then she is doing the trying — probeer gives her a real role (the trier), and she is simultaneously understood as the one who would sleep. The subject is shared between the two verbs by control: the matrix subject controls the silent subject of the infinitive.
A raising verb like blyk (seem / turn out) assigns its subject no role at all. In Hy blyk siek te wees ("he seems to be ill"), hy is not doing any "seeming" — there is no act of seeming that he performs. He is simply the one who is ill; siek wees ("to be ill") is the only predicate that gives him a role. The subject hy has been raised up out of the embedded clause into the main-clause subject position, purely to satisfy the grammar's demand that the main clause have a subject. The main verb merely hosts it.
Hy blyk siek te wees.
He seems to be ill.
Sy probeer om te slaap.
She is trying to sleep.
Raising: the verbs that host but do not assign
The Afrikaans raising verbs are a small, closed set: blyk (turn out / appear, with evidence), skyn (seem / appear, on slighter grounds), lyk (look / seem), and voorkom (appear / strike one as). Semantically they sit close to the copular verbs, and that is no accident — like a copula, they contribute no action, only a framing of the embedded predicate. Note the fine sense difference flagged by usage guides: blyk points to something now evidenced as fact, while skyn points to mere appearance without proof.
The structural giveaway of raising is that the same meaning can be expressed two ways — with the subject raised, or with a dummy dit and a dat-clause — and the two are paraphrases of each other.
Dit blyk dat hy siek is.
It turns out that he is ill.
Hy blyk siek te wees.
He turns out to be ill.
These two say the same thing. In the first, the embedded clause stays whole (dat hy siek is) and the main clause is propped up by the empty placeholder dit. In the second, the embedded subject hy has raised into the main clause and the rest becomes an infinitive (siek te wees). The existence of this dit ... dat paraphrase is itself a raising test: control verbs do not allow it.
Sy skyn die antwoord te ken.
She appears to know the answer.
Dit lyk of dit gaan reën.
It looks like it's going to rain.
Control: the verbs that assign a role to their subject
Control verbs form a large open class: probeer (try), belowe / beloof (promise), weier (refuse), besluit (decide), hoop (hope), vergeet (forget), beplan (plan), and many more. Each assigns its subject a genuine role and then identifies that subject with the unspoken subject of the infinitive. Because the matrix subject is thematically real, there is no dummy-dit paraphrase — you cannot replace the doer with an empty placeholder, because the doer is doing something.
Sy weier om te help.
She refuses to help.
Hy het belowe om vroeg te kom.
He promised to come early.
In Sy weier om te help, sy is both the refuser (role from weier) and the understood helper (subject of help). Try to build the raising paraphrase — Dit weier dat sy help — and it collapses into nonsense, because weier insists on a real, willing subject. That failure is exactly what proves weier is a control verb, not a raising verb.
Ons het besluit om te bly.
We decided to stay.
The tests that make the distinction visible
The reason this contrast matters at C2 is that it predicts behaviour you would otherwise find baffling. Three tests separate the two classes cleanly.
| Test | Raising (blyk, skyn, lyk) | Control (probeer, weier, belowe) |
|---|---|---|
| Dummy-dit paraphrase (Dit ... dat ...) | Yes — Dit blyk dat hy siek is | No — *Dit weier dat sy help |
| Subject can be a weather/expletive dit | Yes — Dit lyk asof dit reën | No — the subject must be a real agent |
| Preserves meaning under passive in the embedded clause | Yes — meaning unchanged | No — meaning shifts with the agent |
The passive test is the most revealing. Because a raising verb assigns no role, swapping the embedded clause to the passive leaves the overall meaning untouched — the raised subject was never an agent anyway, so reorganising the agents below it changes nothing the raising verb cares about.
Die dokter blyk die pasiënt te ondersoek.
The doctor turns out to examine the patient.
Die pasiënt blyk deur die dokter ondersoek te word.
The patient turns out to be examined by the doctor.
These two describe the same situation and are equally true together — that is the hallmark of raising. Now contrast a control verb: Die dokter probeer om die pasiënt te ondersoek ("the doctor tries to examine the patient") and Die pasiënt probeer om deur die dokter ondersoek te word ("the patient tries to be examined by the doctor") describe two different situations with two different willing parties. The control verb assigns a role, so changing who is the agent changes who is doing the trying. The passive test thus exposes the underlying structure that the surface forms hide.
The idiom test — the most elegant proof
There is one more test, and it is the most beautiful, because it relies on the fact that idiom chunks cannot be split. Take a fixed expression whose subject is meaningless on its own — say die hoed pas in die hoed pas hom ("the cap fits him", i.e. the criticism applies to him). A raising verb can lift the idiom's dummy subject without breaking the idiom, because raising does not require the subject to mean anything. A control verb cannot, because it demands a meaningful, willing subject — and an idiom chunk has none to give.
Die hoed blyk hom te pas.
The cap turns out to fit him (the criticism appears to apply to him).
Here blyk raises the idiomatic subject die hoed and the idiom survives — proof positive that blyk assigns it no role. Try the same with a control verb and the idiomatic reading dies, because probeer or weier would force die hoed to be a real, willing agent, which an idiom chunk can never be. This is why the raising/control split is not a mere label: it predicts, in advance, which verbs can host an idiom subject and which cannot.
Where the two look alike — and the trap
The surface trap is that both classes end in an infinitive, and both can take te. The visible difference in standard Afrikaans is often the connector: control verbs typically take the full om ... te frame (probeer om te slaap, weier om te help), while raising verbs take a bare te with no om (blyk te wees, skyn te ken). This is a useful surface clue, though not an absolute rule — some control verbs drop om colloquially. The reliable diagnostic remains the thematic question, not the connector.
Hy lyk moeg.
He looks tired.
Hy probeer om nie moeg te lyk nie.
He's trying not to look tired.
The first is pure raising — hy does no "looking", he simply is tired-seeming. The second nests the two: probeer (control) assigns hy the role of trier, and inside its infinitive sits lyk doing its raising work over moeg. Seeing both mechanisms stacked in one sentence is the surest sign you have internalised the contrast.
Common mistakes
❌ Dit probeer dat sy help.
Incorrect — probeer is a control verb and cannot take a dummy-dit paraphrase; its subject must be a real agent.
✅ Sy probeer om te help.
She is trying to help.
❌ Hy blyk om siek te wees.
Incorrect — raising verbs take bare te, not the om ... te frame.
✅ Hy blyk siek te wees.
He seems to be ill.
❌ Sy weier siek te wees.
Incorrect — this control verb needs the om ... te frame: om ... te.
✅ Sy weier om siek te wees.
She refuses to be ill.
❌ Treating 'Hy blyk siek te wees' as if hy performs an act of seeming.
Incorrect analysis — blyk assigns hy no role; hy is only the one who is ill.
✅ Read it as 'It turns out that he is ill', with hy raised from the embedded clause.
He turns out to be ill.
Key takeaways
- Control verbs (probeer, belowe, weier, besluit) assign their subject a real role and identify it with the infinitive's silent subject; raising verbs (blyk, skyn, lyk, voorkom) assign no role and merely host a subject lifted from the embedded clause.
- The cleanest sorter: raising verbs allow the dummy-dit paraphrase Dit blyk dat...; control verbs do not.
- The passive test and the idiom test prove the structural difference — raising preserves meaning and lets idiom subjects raise intact, because the raised subject was never an agent.
- A useful surface clue: control verbs usually take om ... te, raising verbs take bare te — but the thematic question, not the connector, is the real diagnostic.
- Raising verbs sit close to the copular verbs in meaning; for how the embedded clause attaches, see extraposition and om te-clauses.
Now practice Afrikaans
Reading grammar gets you part of the way. The exercises are where it sticks — free, no signup needed.
Start learning Afrikaans→Related Topics
- Infinitival Clauses: om teA2 — The om te + infinitive clause — Afrikaans's standard 'in order to' and infinitive complement — where om opens the clause and te clings to the infinitive at the very end, bracketing everything in between.
- Copular Verbs: wees, word, lyk, blyA2 — The linking verbs that join a subject to a predicate — is/wees, word, lyk, bly and voel — and why the complement stays bare.
- Extraposition and Heavy ClausesC1 — Why heavy subordinate clauses move to the right of the verb bracket in Afrikaans — the rule that explains the real shape of complex sentences.
- Modal Verbs: kan, mag, moet, wil, salA1 — The Afrikaans modals kan, mag, moet, wil and sal each take a bare infinitive that lands at the end of the clause — your first taste of verb-bracket word order.
- The Infinitive: loop, om te loopA1 — The Afrikaans infinitive is just the bare verb — used directly after modals, and wrapped in 'om te' for purpose and complement clauses.