"risen" for "raised"

[Benjamin Zimmer]

Thanks to Arnold and Larry for their comments, which I've appended to
the Language Log post.

--Ben

On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 12:33 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>
> At 11:55 AM -0500 2/21/08, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>  >On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 11:27 AM, Benjamin Zimmer
>  ><bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu> wrote:
>  >>
>  >>   On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 10:36 AM, <RonButters at aol.com> wrote:
>  >>
>  >>  > Perhaps this is just a typo the both the author and editor missed--or a
>  >>   > hypercorrection--or do people really normally use "risen" as
>  >>the past participle of
>  >>   > "raise"?
>  >>   >
>  >  >  > "Campbell has risen far more in campaign contributions than his [two]
>  >  >  > opponents combined, with a large chunk coming from builders
>  >and contractors." --
>  >>   > Lauren Sellers, "Three with varied viewpoints want Allen's
>  >>house seat," ORLANDO
>  >>   > SENTINEL, 2-21-08, pB3.
>  >>
>  >>  I blame the insidious grammar checker in Microsoft Word. When I run
>  >>   the sentence with "raised" through the checker in MS Word 2003, it
>  >>   suggests replacing "raised" with "risen". So most likely it's a
>  >>   grammatical Cupertino [*].
>  >>
>  >>   [*] http://blog.oup.com/2007/11/spellchecker/
>  >
>  >Now on Language Log:
>  >
>  >http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005404.html
>  >
>  >
>  It's actually subtler than your description of the facts, Ben.  You
>  observe in the LL post that
>  ========
>  It's a rather odd "incorrection" for MS Word to make. I could
>  understand the grammar checker flagging "has rised," but "has raised"
>  is, by and large, used in a perfectly grammatical fashion - very
>  often in the exact context of the Orlando Sentinel article,
>  specifiying how much money a candidate has raised.
>  ========
>  But in fact if the Sentinel reporter had written and spell-checked not
>
>  "Campbell has raised far more in campaign contributions than both his
>  opponents combined,
>
>  but rather
>
>  "Campbell has raised more campaign contributions than both his
>  opponents combined."
>
>  no incorrection to "risen" would have been suggested.  It\'s not the
>  "has raised" that has raised (*risen) the spell-checker's red flag
>  but the "(has) raised...in...", which it took (incorrectly, but
>  plausibly) to signal the presence of an intransitive "rise/risen" as
>  opposed to a transitive "raise/raised".  (On the model of "You've
>  raised my expectations/You've risen in my expectations".)  In the
>  case at issue, "raise" is a transitive verb being used absolutely,
>  but you'll have to admit that's a pretty subtle point for the
>  spell-check to be expected to grasp.

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