Control and Grammar

350 Pages·1992·5.712 MB·English

by  Steven Franks, Norbert Hornstein (auth.), Richard K. Larson, Sabine Iatridou, Utpal Lahiri, James Higginbotham (eds.)

CONTROL AND GRAMMAR
Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy
Volume 48
Managing Editors
GENNARO CHIERCHIA, Cornell University
PAULINE JACOBSON, Brown University
FRANCIS J. PELLETIER, University ofA lberta
Editorial Board
JOHAN V AN BENTHEM, University ofA msterdam
GREGORY N. CARLSON, University of Rochester
DAVID DOWTY, Ohio State University, Columbus
GERALD GAZDAR, University of Sussex, Brighton
IRENE HElM, M.LT., Cambridge
EWAN KLEIN, University of Edinburgh
BILL LADUSAW, University ofCalijornia at Santa Cruz
TERRENCE PARSONS, University ofCalijornia, Irvine
The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume.
CONTROL
AND GRAMMAR
Edited by
RICHARD K. LARSON,
SABINE IATRIDOU,
UTP AL LAHIRI
and
JAMES HIGGINBOTHAM
Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Control and grammar ! edited by Richard K. Larson ... [et al.l.
p. cm. -- (Studies in 1 inguistics and phi losophy ; v. 48)
Chiefly papers presented at a workshop held at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. Mar. 1989.
Inc 1u des index.
1. Control (Linguistics)--Congresses. 2. Grammar. Comparative and
general--Syntax--Congresses. 3. Semantics--Congresses.
4. Generative grammar--Congresses. 1. Larson. Richard K.
II. Ser ies.
P299.C596C66 1992
415--dc20 92-5262
ISBN 978-90-481-4149-4 ISBN 978-94-015-7959-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1 007/978-94-015-7959-9
Printed an acid-free paper
AII Rights Reserved
© 1992 Springer Science+Business Media New York
Original published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1992
Softcover reprint of the hardcover lst edition 1992
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice
may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic
or mechanical, inc1uding photocopying, recording or by any information
storage and retrieval system, without written permis sion from
the copyright owner.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
EDITORS' INTRODUCTION vii
STEVEN FRANKS and NORBERT HORNSTEIN / Secondary
Predication in Russian and Proper Government of PRO 1
KENNETH HALE I Subject Obviation, Switch Reference, and
Control 51
JAMES HIGGINBOTHAM I Reference and Control 79
JAMES HUANG I Complex Predicates in Control 109
PAULINE JACOBSON I Raising without Movement 149
BRIAN JOSEPH I Diachronic Perspectives on Control 195
HOWARD LASNIK / Two Notes on Control and Binding 235
KENNETH WEXLER I Some Issues in the Growth of Control 253
EDWIN WILLIAMS / Adjunct Control 297
INDEX OF NAMES 323
INDEX OF SUBJECTS 327
v
INTRODUCTION
The articles in this volume grew from papers presented at the workshop
on control held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, March
1989. The work of the various authors comes at a moment in linguistic
theory that is notable for two developments. First, there has been
increasing involvement of syntactic theory in semantics and of semantic
theory in syntax, with the result that the sorting of facts into syntactic
and semantic has become a more complex and theory-laden affair.
Second, there has been an enormous growth both in the breadth and
depth of studies in languages other than English. Both of these develop
ments have left their mark on the authors, directly and indirectly. They
have also been responsible for the shifts that have given the key
terminology its present range of application. In this introduction we
discuss the background to the issues that were particularly prominent
both at the workshop and in the authors' final drafts. We also com
ment on the spirit of inquiry that they represent. Our goal is to provide
some orientation to the specific contents of the essays and to supply
material for reflection on a set of problems that will doubtless develop
and deepen as rapidly in the foreseeable future as they have in the
recent past.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: THE STANDARD THEORY
The grammatical phenomenon of control is today understood in the
sense introduced by Postal (1970), who applied the term to a variety of
cases where an understood argument of a complement or adjunct
clause was related to an explicit element occurring elsewhere in the
sentence. Under this general view, there could be control of a subject
by a subject, as in (la), control of an object by a subject as in (lb),
control of a subject by an object as in (lc), and control of an object
by an object, as in (ld); "backwards" control was also recognized, as
in (Ie):
Vll
R. K. Larson, S. latridou, U. Lahiri and I. Higginbotham (eds.), Control and Grammar,
vii-xix.
© 1992 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
viii RICHARD K. LARSON ET AL.
(1) (a) John promised [_ to leave]
(b) John is easy [to please_]
(c) It behooves Mary [_ to invite John]
(d) Mary bought bones [for Bill to give _ to the dog]
(e) [_learning about dinosaurs] thrilled Oscar
Control in this broad sense was the phenomenon used by Chomsky
(1965) to motivate the notion of deep structure, and to illustrate the
limitations of linguistic theories that confined themselves to assigning
appropriate labeled bracketings to well-formed expressions. As Chomsky
noted, such theories provide no way of accounting for the differences
between an example like (lb), which shows object control, and an
example like (2), which shows subject control:
(2) John is eager [_ to please]
Even in this wide sense, control was early on distinguished from
raising, where the explicit element occurred in a position that could be
occupied by an expletive, and where selectional restrictions were
determined by the embedded predicate, as in (3):
(3) (a) John seems [_ to be a nice fellow]
(b) It seems [John is a nice fellow]
Nonetheless, it was widely recognized that the analysis of control and of
raising must be closely linked. It was observed that a number of verbs
in contemporary English admit both raising and control construals, the
classic example (due to Perlmutter (1970)) being the verb begin. Begin
occurs in contexts like (4a), involving expletive there, and hence raising.
And it also occurs in contexts like (4b), where the presence of the
agent-oriented adverb deliberately shows that the subject is thematic,
and hence that the understood subject is controlled:
(4) (a) There began [_ to be problems]
(b) John deliberately began [_ to make rude noises]
In his contribution to the workshop (regrettably not included here)
Roger Higgins detailed the development of raising in English out of
control constructions.
For both raising and control, the question arises as to the nature of
the understood elements. In the period following Aspects of the Theory
of Syntax (Chomsky (1965)), it was generally assumed that these were
INTRODUCTION ix
syntactically present at some level of underlying structure.1 Just how the
understood elements were present remained open, however. Under
Rosenbaum's Equi-NP deletion (Rosenbaum (1967», the phrase struc
ture for an example like (1a) was derived from one like (5) by eliding a
copy of the controlling element in the controlled site. As is well-known,
such analyses faced the question of how to distinguish (6a) from (6b),
or how to derive (7), whose understood subject is certainly not inter
pretable as a question-word:
(5) John promised [John to leave]
(6) (a) Everyone wants [_ to leave]
(b) Everyone wants [everyone to leave]
(7) Who wants [_ to leave]?
If Equi (in its original form) is abandoned, but an underlying element is
still assumed to occupy the controlled site, then two broad lines remain
open to us. On the one hand, we may retain the deletion analysis and
take the elided item to be an element not identical with, but rather
anaphoric to the controller. Alternatively, we can dispense with the
deletion altogether, and take the underlying element to be a phoneti
cally empty formative. These alternatives were already anticipated in
Postal (1970). Postal remarks that "one can naturally think of deletion
governed by coreference as equivalent to the existence of some general
pronoun, call it Doom, which accidentally has the null phonological
shape." (p. 458) Their fuller exploration may be traced to Chomsky
(1973), Chomsky and Lasnik (1977), and subsequent investigations.
Postal's hypothetical morpheme Doom became the "pronominal"
element PRO of later work, and in the period following Chomsky
(1973) this element was distinguished from other phonetically unreal
ized formatives such as the bound variable left behind by WH-move
ment. That period too saw raising brought under a general conception
of NP-movement, an operation analyzed as leaving a trace (t) that was
also to be distinguished from PRO. Thus (1a) came to be analyzed as in
(8), and (3a) as in (9):
(8) John promised [PRO to leave]
(9) John seems [t to be a nice fellow]
Finally, the cases of object-control came to be assimilated to the theory
x RICHARD K. LARSON ET AL.
of relative clause (WH-) binding, following Chomsky (1977), and with
the general acceptance of that point of view, left the theory of control
altogether.
DEVELOPMENTS IN OTHER FRAMEWORKS
The introduction of PRO and trace (t) in the Standard Theory was
bound up with (and to some extent driven by) an assumption that had
been present since very early on, namely, that verbal and adjectival
complements are invariably clausal, despite the presence of one or
more surface "gaps".2 In the mid-1970's this position was seriously
challenged by the work of Montague (1973), Thomason (1976) and
others, who pursued an assumption diametrically opposite to Chomsky's,
namely, that infinitival and other controlled complements are clausal
neither in form nor in meaning. Thus Montague analyzed the syntax of
a control construction like (lOa) essentially as in (lOb), where the
infinitive is represented as a "bare VP" rather than a full S. Further
more, Montague analyzed the "logical form" of this construction as in
(lOc), in which the infinitive-embedding verb is understood as ex
pressing a relation (hope*) between an individual (John) and a property
("'to win) rather than between an individual and a clausal meaning (a
proposition):
(10) (a) John hopes to win.
(b) John[vp hopes [vp to win]]
(c) hope*(John, lito win)
Under this conception, the relation between the infinitival construction
in (lOa) and the finite construction in (lla) (where he is understood as
referring to John) is captured through certain semantic entailment
relations. Assuming the existence of a distinct clause-selecting predicate
expressing a relation (hope+) between an individual and a proposition
(lIb), the relation between the nonfinite and finite constructions can be
secured by means of a meaning-postulate such as (11c):3
(11) (a) John hopes that he wins.
(b) hope+(John, that John wins)
II
(c) "Ix, P[hope*(x, liP) ..... hope+(x, IIP(X))]
On this view, control becomes a matter of the lexical entailments of
INTRODUCTION Xl
specific predicates rather than of anaphoric relations between overt and
underlying syntactic elements.
The years since Montague's initial proposals have seen investigation
of the full space of analytical possibilities that are available according to
whether one takes control complements to clausal versus nonclausal
in their syntax, and propositional versus nonpropositional in their
semantics (12):4
(12) Clausal Nonclausal
Propositional (A) (C)
N onpropositional (B) (D)
Thus, as we have noted, modern versions of the Extended Standard
Theory (Chomsky (1981, 1986), Manzini (1983), Koster (1984),
Higginbotham (this volume)) adopt essentially the position in (A),
where control constructions are both clausal and propositional. In
contrast, Extended Montague Grammar (Montague (1973), Thomason
(1976), Chierchia (1984), Dowty (1985)) occupies the diametrically
opposed cell in (D), where control constructions are neither clausal nor
propositional.
The cell in (B) is represented by the work of Williams (1980, this
volume), and also by Chierchia in more recent work (see Chierchia
(1990)). Williams argues that while controlled infinitives are syntac
tically clausal, their semantics is that of predicates - things true of
objects and entities. Williams proposes that the control relation is
fundamentally a form of predication like that holding between a subject
NP and VP in a simple clause. On this view, the controlled complement
retains its implicit subject PRO, however the latter is no longer under
stood on analogy with referential elements like pronouns, but rather on
analogy with a variable bound by lambda abstraction:
(13) hope(John, AX [win(x)])
A
Essentially the inverse position to that of Williams - the view that
controlled complements are non-clausal in their syntax but proposi
tional in their semantics (C) - has also been advanced by a number of
researchers. Thus in the Categorial Grammar approach of Bach and
Partee (1980) and in the GPSG analysis of Klein and Sag (1985), the
syntax of (14a) is understood as in (14b). However the compositional
semantic rules applying to this sentence yield a logical translation as in