Is 'raising' an outdated concept in modern linguistics?

Question

Here's a paragraph from this EFL Magazine article "SUBJECT RAISING: DO YOU HAPPEN TO KNOW?" (2015):

Not long ago, most linguists believed there really was a set of processes in our brains called ‘transformations’, where words moved around inside sentences, to turn simple statements into things like questions, negatives, passives, etc. This idea seems to have fallen out of favour in modern linguistics, which feels like a shame to me – I like the idea of words whizzing around inside our brains. But whether or not it really happens in our brains, I think the image of subjects being raised to different parts of sentences is still a useful way of understanding the structure.

(Emphasis mine.)

This paragraph seems to suggest that 'raising' is an outdated concept in modern linguistics (although the author still finds it useful).

Is this true?

If so, how does 'modern linguistics' explain what is called 'raising' constructions?

EDIT

For example, doesn't HPSG do away with the concept of 'raising' altogether? I don't know if HPSG is one of the modernest linguistics theories, but it seems fairly new.

EDIT

This paper on HPSG "Lingering Challenges to the Raising to Object and Object Control Constructions" has this description of HPSG regarding example (45):

The HPSG account shares with the overt raising account the assumption that ‘Marcia’ in (1), repeated here as (45), appears in the main clause in the surface string.

(45) Cindy believes Marcia to be a genius.

It differs from the movement accounts, though, by assuming a monostratal syntax, which means that though ‘Marcia’ is the object of ‘believes’ in the phrasal syntax, it is associated with the syntactic and semantic features of the embedded predicate (‘to be a genius’) by a kind of complete phrase coindexing called structure-sharing, and not movement. In a sense, the NP ‘Marcia’ is equally associated with the main clause verb and the embedded clause verb; but in the surface string it is in the main clause.

This sounds like HPSG doesn't posit movement (or raising for that matter) to analyze (45).

Answer 1

No, Raising is alive and well, but the conception of Raising as a transformation is moribund, because transformations are no longer accepted. So, if we believe in Raising, and Raising is a transformation, where does that leave us? In a word, confused.

Confused, but at least open to the possibility that Raising exists but is not a transformation. Well, transformational grammar is not the only theory under the sun, after all, so we should look to some other theoretical account of Raising. My favorite candidate is Relational Grammar, one of whose proponents, Paul Postal, it happens, wrote the book on Raising.

HPSG, which you mention, is a revision to GPSG, and GPSG in a certain (rather trivial) sense contains Relational Grammar, since it attributes a "GR" (Grammatical Relation) to every NP, and offers a description of Raising. However, in my opinion, these extensions of CFG (Context Free Phrase Structure Grammar) are too artificial to be true.

Thinking of Raising as an upward movement in a tree structure, I myself offered a theory here, which I called "2psg", which describes Raising as a change in grammatical relation, or obliqueness. (Construing grammatical relations as degrees of obliqueness is also found in HPSG.)