The subject of nonfinite clauses is often missing, and yet is understood to refer to some linguistic or contextual referent (e.g. 'Bill preferred __ to remain silent' is understood as 'Bill preferred ...that he himself would remain silent'). This dependency is the subject matter of control theory. Extensive linguistic research into control constructions over the past five decades has unearthed a wealth of empirical findings in dozens of languages. Their proper classification and analysis, however, have been a matter of continuing debate within and across different theoretical schools. This comprehensive book pulls together, for the first time, all the important advances on the topic. Among the issues discussed are: the distinction between raising and control, obligatory and nonobligatory control, syntactic interactions with case, finiteness and nominalization, lexical determination of the controller, and phenomena like partial and implicit control. The critical discussions in this work will stimulate students and scholars to further explorations in this fascinating field.
Although they participate in control relations, implicit arguments are standardly viewed as unprojected θ-roles, absent from the syntax. I challenge this view and argue that implicit arguments are ...syntactically represented. The argument rests on the observation that implicit arguments can exercise partial control, and the claim that partial control must be encoded in the syntax (given plausible assumptions on the limits of lexical relations). I further argue that the syntactic constitution of implicit arguments is more impoverished than that of pro, explaining their differential visibility to various syntactic processes.
Hebrew is standardly cited as a language exhibiting Verb-stranding VP-ellipsis (VSVPE). Systematic reassessment of the data demonstrates that all the alleged evidence for VSVPE is consistent with ...Argument Ellipsis (AE); furthermore, there are ample data that are only consistent with AE, and more revealingly, data that can only be explained if VSVPE is unavailable. Finally, the verb preceding the missing object need not match the antecedent verb, falsifying the “Verb Identity Requirement”. The conclusion that Hebrew employs AE (similarly to East Asian languages) but not VSVPE focuses attention both on the typology of AE and on the so-far hidden constraints against VSVPE derivations.
Prevalent treatments of Obligatory Control (OC) derive the distribution of PRO from either government or case theory. However, ample crosslinguistic evidence demonstrates that PRO is case-marked just ...like any other DP. The phenomenon of finite control in the Balkan languages and in Hebrew, where subjunctive complements exhibit OC, demonstrates that the licensing of PRO must be sensitive to the distribution of the features Tense and Agr both on I0and C0. OC is conceived as an instance of Agree; a local calculus, interacting with feature checking and deletion, determines that PRO is in general the "elsewhere" case of referential subjects. However, the two types of subjects may alternate in certain environments, an inexplicable fact for most existing accounts. The system proposed naturally extends to other types of complements, like inflected infinitives and obviative subjunctives. The resulting typology offers a systematic picture of the intricate ways in which finiteness and control interact in different languages.
The unpronounced subject of infinitives, PRO, bears standard case, which is reflected on agreeing predicative elements in languages like Russian, Icelandic, Ancient Greek, etc. This case can be ...independent from the case of the controller DP, or identical to it ('case transmission'). We report the findings of a novel study of case transmission in Russian, based on data collected from 30 speakers. The findings contradict some key generalizations that have gone unchallenged in the field for decades; specifically, case transmission is much more prevalent than previously assumed, often co-occurring with the option of independent case. The pattern of case transmission is determined by the interaction of a complex set of factors—the grammatical function of the controller, the shape of the complementizer, the type of control relation (exhaustive or partial), and more. The proposed analysis builds on "The Agreement Model of Obligatory Control (OC)" (Landau 2000, 2004, 2006) and strongly supports the claim that OC exploits two routes—either a direct Agree relation with PRO, or one mediated by the infinitival C. It is derivationally local and free of the "lookahead" properties inherent to earlier accounts. Finally, we provide a description of the documented crosslinguistic variation in this domain, and situate it within a tight typological model.
The fact that the specifier of T⁰ is subject both to the Extended Projection Principle (EPP) and to the Empty Category Principle (ECP) has remained an unexplained accident within Government-Binding ...Theory. I propose a principled account of this correlation. The EPP is a selectional requirement of functional heads (e.g., T, Top, C) that applies at PF--an instance of p-selection for an overt element. Like all selectional requirements, it applies to the head of the selected phrase, explaining why null heads cannot appear in EPP positions (thus deriving certain representational ECP effects). A wide range of empirical results follow, all unified by the exclusion of null-headed phrases from EPP positions: subject-object asymmetries in the distribution of bare nouns in Romance and sentential complements; failure of certain adjuncts to occur in clause-initial position; resistance of indirect objects to Ā-movement; and phonological doubling of heads of fronted categories. I argue against the agreement/checking view of the EPP and show that only the selectional construal allows a natural explanation of its puzzling properties.
. The copy theory of movement receives the strongest form of support from instances of movement leaving phonetically visible copies. Such is the case in Hebrew V(P)‐fronting, where the fronted verb ...surfaces as an infinitive, and its “trace” is pronounced as an inflected verbal copy. This paper argues that V‐doubling is explained by the same algorithm that determines pronunciation of single copies in canonical chains. The phonetic resolution of chains is PF‐internal, strictly local, and need not appeal to cross‐interface recoverability constraints. Crosslinguistic variation in predicate clefts largely reflects different morpho‐phonological strategies of realizing the fronted predicate head.
A new account of the peculiar syntax of psychological verbs argues that experiencers are grammaticalized as locative phrases.
Experiencers—grammatical participants that undergo a certain ...psychological change or are in such a state—are grammatically special. As objects (John scared Mary; loud music annoys me), experiencers display two peculiar clusters of nonobject properties across different languages: their syntax is often typical of oblique arguments and their semantic scope is typical of subjects. In The Locative Syntax of Experiencers, Idan Landau investigates this puzzling correlation and argues that experiencers are syntactically coded as (mental) locations. Drawing on results from a range of languages and theoretical frameworks, Landau examines the far-reaching repercussions of this simple claim. Landau shows that all experiencer objects are grammaticalized as locative phrases, introduced by a dative/locative preposition. “Bare” experiencer objects are in fact oblique, too, the preposition being null. This preposition accounts for the oblique psych(ological) properties, attested in case alternations, cliticization, resumption, restrictions on passive formation, and so on. As locatives, object experiencers may undergo locative inversion, giving rise to the common phenomenon of quirky experiencers. When covert, this inversion endows object experiencers with wide scope, attested in control, binding, and wh-quantifier interactions. Landau's synthesis thus provides a novel solution to some of the oldest puzzles in the generative study of psychological verbs. The Locative Syntax of Experiencers offers the most comprehensive description of the syntax of psychological verbs to date, documenting their special properties in more than twenty languages. Its basic theoretical claim is readily translatable into alternative frameworks. Existing accounts of psychological verbs either consider very few languages or fail to incorporate other theoretical frameworks; this study takes a broader perspective, informed by findings of four decades of research
Theories of argument ellipsis based on PF deletion or LF copying do not generate predictions regarding possible constraints on the semantic type of the elided argument. Yet such constraints obtain, ...as documented in Landau 2022: only type-e arguments can be targeted by argument ellipsis. Focusing on quantificational arguments here, I show that when they yield readings expressible by type-e denotations, they may elide, but when they denote genuine generalized quantifiers, they may not. Utilizing the restricted range of interpretations made available by choice function binding and E-type pronouns, the analysis derives a number of peculiar scopal properties of indefinite NPs, quantifiers, and exceptive phrases under argument ellipsis.
. Deriving the distribution of PRO in a principled manner is a central task for the theory of control. Traditionally, Case has been identified as the key to this problem: PRO was argued to bear no ...Case at all, or some special (‘‘null’’) Case. I argue that PRO bears standard case like normal lexical DPs; clear evidence comes from languages with case‐concord (Russian, Hungarian, Icelandic). Moreover, PRO (and obligatory control) may occur in finite clauses (Hebrew, Balkan languages). Conclusion: PRO's distribution must be completely divorced from Case, possibly because Case does not exist. The alternative is to tie the distribution of PRO to the specific values of T and Agr on the I0 and C0 heads of the embedded clause (Landau 2004). A feature‐based algorithm predicts the distribution of PRO in a variety of clausal complements. It is shown that the system naturally explains some intriguing correlations between obligatory control and agreement in Basque and Welsh complementation structures.
PDF
