Raising and Control Structures

Two Portuguese sentences can look almost identical on the surface and yet have completely different hidden architectures. Ele parece dormir ("He seems to sleep") and Ele quer dormir ("He wants to sleep") share the pattern subject + verb + infinitive — but in the first, ele is logically the subject of dormir (he is the one sleeping, and "seem" just comments on it), while in the second, ele is the subject of querer (he is the one wanting), and it merely controls an unspoken subject of dormir. This page unpacks that split — the distinction linguists call raising versus control — and shows why Portuguese's personal infinitive makes it visible in ways English cannot.

You do not need the terminology to speak Portuguese, but understanding it solves a real practical problem: it predicts when you can — and cannot — attach person endings to the infinitive, and it explains why some verbs accept parece chover ("it seems to rain") while others never could.

The core intuition: who owns the subject?

Take any sentence of the form NP + V + infinitive. Ask one question: does the first verb assign a role to the subject, or does the subject really belong to the infinitive?

• With control verbs (querer, tentar, prometer, conseguir, decidir), the subject genuinely does the main verb's action. In Ele quer sair, ele is the one who wants. The wanting is his. He also happens to be the understood "leaver," but the main verb has a firm grip on him.
• With raising verbs (parecer, começar a, acabar de, deixar de, costumar), the main verb assigns no role at all to the subject. In Ele parece cansado, ele is not doing any "seeming" — parecer is just a lens. The subject has been lifted ("raised") out of the lower clause to sit in front, but semantically it still belongs below.

Raising verbs: the subject is on loan from below

Raising verbs are semantically "thin." They report on a situation without adding a participant. The clearest member is parecer ("to seem"). Watch how the same idea can be phrased two ways:

In the first, parecer is impersonal — que ele está cansado is a full clause and the dummy "it" sits silently in subject position. In the second, ele has been raised to the front of parecer, leaving estar cansado as a bare infinitive. The meaning is identical. That paraphrase — being convertible to parece que + finite clause — is the signature of raising.

The aspectual verbs começar a, acabar de, deixar de, passar a, and the habitual costumar behave the same way. In A situação começa a melhorar, a situação does not "do" any beginning — the improving is what begins, and the subject is really the subject of melhorar. This is why these verbs combine freely with predicates that have no agent:

Control verbs: the subject is the boss

Control verbs assign a real thematic role to their subject and then leave the infinitive's subject unpronounced but understood as identical (or related) to a noun in the main clause. The grammar of "want," "try," "promise," "manage," and "decide" requires a participant who wants, tries, promises, manages, or decides.

In A Marina prometeu ajudar, Marina is unambiguously the promiser, and she is also the understood helper. The infinitive ajudar has a silent subject "controlled" by Marina. Crucially, you cannot paraphrase this with parece que: *"Promete que a Marina ajuda" is not a paraphrase of the original — proof that prometer is control, not raising.

Most control verbs identify the infinitive's subject with the main subject (subject control: querer, tentar, conseguir, decidir, prometer). A smaller set identifies it with the object (object control: mandar, obrigar, convencer, aconselhar):

Here aconselhar makes me (the object) the understood rester, not the doctor — that is object control. Recognizing the difference matters because it tells you who the silent subject of the infinitive is.

Where Portuguese gets special: the personal infinitive

English has no person-marked infinitive — "to leave" is "to leave" for everybody. Portuguese does: the personal infinitive can carry endings (sair, saíres, sairmos, saírem). This is where raising and control diverge sharply, because the two structures react to person marking in opposite ways.

With control verbs, the infinitive's subject is already controlled by the main clause, so adding a personal-infinitive ending is normally redundant and often ungrammatical when the subjects are the same:

You say Queremos sair, not *"Queremos sairmos" — the -mos on querer already fixes "we" as the leaver. The personal infinitive only surfaces with control verbs when a preposition introduces a clause with its own subject, which pushes you out of pure control and into ordinary subordinate-clause territory (covered on the personal infinitive pages).

With raising verbs, the personal infinitive is likewise blocked, but for a deeper reason: there is no separate subject down below to mark. Compare:

You say Eles parecem estar, never *"Eles parecem estarem." The plural lives on parecer; the infinitive estar stays bare because its subject was raised up and is no longer locally available to host an ending. This is one of the most reliable diagnostics in the language: a true raising structure refuses the personal infinitive.

A side-by-side summary

A tricky overlap: deixar de and começar a

Some verbs lead a double life. Acabar with a direct object means "to finish" (control: Acabei o trabalho — "I finished the work," I did the finishing), but in the periphrasis acabar de + infinitive it is purely aspectual recent-past (Acabei de comer — "I just ate"), which is raising. Likewise parar can mean a willful "stop" (control) or an aspectual "cease" (raising). Native speakers switch effortlessly; for learners, the rule is to test the meaning, not the verb spelling:

Parou de chover is unmistakably raising — there is no agent who "stopped." That is your proof the verb is functioning aspectually here.

Common Mistakes

These are the errors English speakers make most often, because English collapses raising and control into one surface pattern.

Key Takeaways

• Raising verbs (parecer, começar a, acabar de, deixar de, costumar) give their surface subject no role; the subject really belongs to the infinitive. Test: it paraphrases as parece que
  • clause and tolerates weather verbs.
• Control verbs (querer, tentar, prometer, conseguir, aconselhar) assign a real role to the subject and control a silent infinitive subject — either the main subject (subject control) or the object (object control).
• Both structures keep the infinitive bare under identity of subjects. The personal infinitive's person endings appear only when a genuinely separate subject enters the lower clause, which is no longer pure raising or control.
• English hides this split entirely; Portuguese exposes it through the personal infinitive, which is why this distinction is worth learning explicitly.