A Case of Subject Raising in Egyptian: The Pattern NP pw AP

This paper discusses the grammatical pattern NP – pw – AP of Earlier Egyptian. The pattern appears to combine characteristics of both the nominal sentence and the adverbial sentence, which has impeded its understanding. While a broad consensus has been reached concerning its semantic function, something like “it is (the case) that NP is AP”, its syntactic structure has remained less clear. We face a mismatch between the semantic structure of the pattern (it is that NP is AP) and its apparent syntactic surface structure (it is NP, being AP). The proposed explanation is that the underlying subject of the embedded clause has been raised into the matrix clause, a phenomenon known as subject raising. While subject raising is well known from many languages around the world, the raising of the subject into the predicate position of the matrix clause, as seen here, seems to be a hitherto undescribed linguistic phenomenon.