Obligatory control and local reflexives

2010 ◽  
pp. 67-88
Author(s):  
Norbert Hornstein ◽  
Paul Pietroski
Keyword(s):  
Obligatory Control

scholarly journals Obligatory Control in Irish and Polish: A Reappraisal

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 89-102
Author(s):  
Anna Bondaruk ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Partial Control ◽  
Obligatory Control ◽  
Movement Theory ◽  
Short Overview ◽  
Empty Category ◽  
P Movement ◽  
Finite Clause

Obligatory control (henceforth, OC) has constituted a topic extensively discussed in the literature (cf., for instance, Williams (1980), Landau (2000), Wurmbrand (2001)). Recently the controversy over OC has climaxed in the emergence of two rivaling approaches, deriving it via two distinct mechanisms. The movement theory of control, advocated by Hornstein (1999, 2001, 2003), Boeckx and Hornstein (2004, 2006), among others, derives OC by means of the N(D)P-movement of the alleged controller of PRO without posting PRO as a separate empty category altogether. The latter approach – the calculus of control proposed by Landau (2004, 2008) – maintaining the existence of PRO, obtains OC thanks to the interplay between C and I found in the non-finite clause. The present paper is rooted within the second approach and its main objective consists in providing an analysis of OC in Irish and Polish. The paper starts with a short overview of two subtypes of OC, i.e. exhaustive and partial control. This is followed by a brief outline of Landau’s (2004, 2008) model. Afterwards, an attempt is made to analyse Irish and Polish OC within Landau’s calculus of control.

On non-obligatory control

2010 ◽  
pp. 195-209
Author(s):  
Cedric Boeckx ◽  
Norbert Hornstein ◽  
Jairo Nunes
Keyword(s):  
Obligatory Control

Theses

1988 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 421-434
Keyword(s):  
Control Object ◽  
Semantic Description ◽  
Semantic Approach ◽  
Object Control ◽  
Obligatory Control ◽  
Variable Control ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Empty Element ◽  
Theoretical Side

A description of 1600 French verbs shows that three types of control verbs should be distinguished in French: subject control, object control, and variable control verbs. The control properties of these verbs can be related to their syntactic or distributional characteristics. It appears that object control verbs and the different subclasses of variable control verbs are semantically coherent: each class of variable control verbs can be described as a particular type of transfer (promettre, garantir/ demander supplier/ proposer, offrir). These types of transfer are described by a highly elaborate semantic description that allows for deontically and temporally defined Source / Goal relations. This semantic approach also incorporates a description of the agentive properties necessary for a complement to qualify as a controller by the introduction of the notion of direct and indirect agentivity. Thus, we are able to explain why the subject of object control verbs cannot qualify as a controller, and how control shifts come about. On the theoretical side, this analysis shows that the GB distinction between obligatory and non obligatory control is not relevant, and that the empty element PRO is superfluous.

Who is the agent? The influence of pragmatic leads on children's reference assignment in non-obligatory control

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 442-478 ◽  
Author(s):  
VIKKI JANKE
Keyword(s):  
Current Understanding ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Reference Resolution ◽  
Null Subject ◽  
Obligatory Control ◽  
Complex Sentences ◽  
Selection Tasks ◽  
Finite Clause

AbstractNon-obligatory control constructions (NOC) are sentences which contain a non-finite clause with a null subject whose reference is determined pragmatically. Little is known about how children assign reference to these subjects, yet this is important as our current understanding of reference-resolution development is limited to less complex sentences with overt elements, such as pronouns. This study explores how seventy-six children (aged six to eleven) consult pragmatic leads when assigning reference in two examples of NOC. Children undertook three picture-selection tasks, containing no lead, a weak lead, and a strong lead, and their reference choices in the critical sentences were monitored. The novel results pinpoint children's baseline interpretations of the ambiguous sentences and expose an age trend in the degree to which they consult strong pragmatic leads when resolving reference. These trends illustrate how reference assignment in more complex discourse-governed contexts progresses, thereby contributing an important dimension to the pragmatics acquisition literature.

scholarly journals Identity Avoidance with Reflexive Clitics in European Portuguese and Minimalist Approaches to Control

2017 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 627-649 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Maria Martins ◽  
Jairo Nunes
Keyword(s):  
Obligatory Control ◽  
European Portuguese

In this article, we discuss two types of cooccurrence restrictions involving reflexive clitics in European Portuguese and examine their implications for obligatory control. We argue that these restrictions may shed some light on where the controller is generated, thus making it possible to empirically test three Minimalist approaches to control: the predicate attraction approach (see Manzini and Roussou 2000 ), the PRO-based approach (e.g., Chomsky and Lasnik 1993 , Landau 2000 , 2004 , Martin 2001 ), and the movement approach (e.g., Hornstein 1999 , 2001 , Boeckx, Hornstein, and Nunes 2010 ). We show that none of the approaches is able to capture all the relevant data if pursued under a strong lexicalist perspective such as Chomsky’s ( 1993 , 2000 ) and that only the movement approach can account for all the data in a uniform way under Chomsky’s (2001) weak lexicalist perspective.

scholarly journals Studies in complement control

2007 ◽  
Vol 47 ◽  
pp. 219
Author(s):  
Barbara Stiebels
Keyword(s):  
Common Interest ◽  
German Research Foundation ◽  
Control Structures ◽  
Obligatory Control ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Finite Control ◽  
Syntactic Approach ◽  
Adjunct Control ◽  
Lexical Approach ◽  
Infinitival Complements

This volume represents a collection of papers that present some of the results of two projects on control: on the one hand, the project Typology of complement control directed by Barbara Stiebels and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG STI 151/2-2), and on the other hand the project Variation in control structures directed by Maria Polinsky and Eric Potsdam and funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF grants BCS-0131946, BCS-0131993; website http://accent.ucsd.edu/). Whereas the first project pursued a lexical approach to control with a semantic definition of obligatory control, the second project has mainly pursued a syntactic approach to control – with special emphasis on less studied control structures (such as adjunct control, backward control, finite control, etc.). Both projects have aimed at extending the research on complement control to structures that differ from the prototypical cases of infinitival complements with empty subjects found in many Indo-European languages; their common interest was to bring in new empirical data, both primary and experimental.  

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