Abstract
Standard semantic theories of Obligatory Control (OC) capture the obligatory de se reading of PRO but fail to explain why it agrees with the controller. Standard syntactic theories of OC explain the agreement but not the obligatory de se reading. A new synthesis is developed to solve this fundamental problem, in which the controller directly binds a variable in the edge of the complement. The associated semantics utilizes the idea that de se attitudes can be modelled as a special case of de re attitudes. The specific interaction of feature transmission and phase-based locality derives a striking universal asymmetry: Inflection on the embedded verb blocks OC in attitude complements but not in nonattitude complements. A semantic benefit is a straightforward account for “unexpected” binding between PRO and de re reflexives/pronouns.
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Notes
- 1.
There is a narrowly circumscribed class of exceptions to Fact 2: Inflected infinitives that display partial control in Brazilian Portuguese may (and sometimes must) carry plural agreement although the controller is singular (Modesto 2010, 2013). This is due to the intervention of additional syntactic material in the complement (see discussion in Landau 2016). I do not discuss partial control in this paper.
- 2.
- 3.
The problem is not due to a semantic clash between the gender features of the (doxastic counterpart of) Pavarotti and the reflexive herself. First, ϕ-features on bound reflexives are uninterpreted (Heim 2008, Kratzer 2009). Second, the problem remains even when the reflexive is nonargumental (hence, its ϕ-features are necessarily inert): *Pavarotti promised Olga to behave/perjure herself.
- 4.
An anonymous reviewer also raises the question whether the world-center in OC should be unified with the experiencer of taste predicates, given examples like Mary wants to be dead, where want quantifies over <w,j> pairs in which j is not capable of experiencing w at all.
- 5.
The ϕ-matching condition is lifted in languages with indexical shift, allowing 1st person embedded pronouns to be semantically bound by 3rd person matrix DPs.
- 6.
Adapting a proposal by Percus and Sauerland (2003b), Pearson (2013: 536) speculates that the abstractor is just PRO itself, having moved from the subject position. This simplifies the process in that ϕ-matching between PRO and its binder reduces to copy identity under movement. The problems listed below, however, remain unchanged.
- 7.
The four semantic proposals discussed here invoke either Feature Transmission or Feature Deletion to explain the absence of the standard presuppsoitional import of ϕ-features on bound pronouns. It is well-known that other accounts exist that rely on assigning bound pronouns nonstandard denotations (Sudo 2014). The agreement problem, however, is deeper than the distinctions among these camps, which all rely on the premise that agreement requires coindexing. But on the standard semantic analysis of OC, PRO is not essentially coindexed with the controller DP; rather, it is coindexed with a local operator. Hence, all these approaches to ϕ-features on bound pronouns fail to extend to OC. Nevertheless, a crucial crosslinguistic generalization about the distribution of OC complements will turn out to favor the Feature Transmission approach; see Sect. 5.4.
- 8.
The semantic literature, by and large, does not acknowledge the problem of agreement in OC. A notable exception is Schlenker (2003, 2011): “In a nutshell, the difficulty is that even though PRO is bound by an operator in the embedded clause, it still inherits its morphological features from an argument of the matrix clause. The details are somewhat stipulative on every account” (Schlenker 2011: 1575).
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
It is, in fact, not required that the res-containing expression, GP, occupy a clause-peripheral position. The particular format in (15) is already geared towards the OC structure in (18) below, where GP is necessarily generated in [Spec,CP].
- 12.
From this point on I focus on de se and assume that de te is amenable to a parallel treatment.
- 13.
One might object that writing de se into lexical meanings does not explain it; but this objection, of course, equally holds of the standard accounts. Natural language privileges de se attitudes and this design feature must ultimately be reflected in lexical inventories. Still, the clear advantage of the current proposal is that it does not posit systematically ambiguous lexical entries for attitude verbs, one for de re and one for de se. Rather, there is a single de re verbal entry for both readings, and distinctions in possible values for the concept generator are specified on the different complementizers the verb may take (which are anyway distinguished in form).
- 14.
This result may not be trivial if attitude complements are treated as sets of centered-worlds rather than contexts projected from C. Indeed, as an anonymous reviewer observes, the two implementations are semantically equivalent. However, on the centered-worlds implementation (e.g., Stephenson 2010), the λ-binder of PRO is not projected from C in any syntactic sense. Thus, the choice of the belief-world variable as the world argument inside GP seems arbitrary. In contrast, the choice of i’ as the context argument inside GP in (18) can be seen as a syntactic reflex of selection by the i’-bearing head, C.
- 15.
Sauerland (2013) sketches a solution to the agreement problem of de se pronouns that invokes a de re component in them. This component, however, unlike pro x in the present account, does not enter any syntactic relation with the controller; rather, it is locally bound by an operator at the left edge of the complement. Hence, the same difficulties arise as on the other semantic approaches discussed in Sect. 3.
- 16.
The analysis in (18) is much inspired by Percus and Sauerland (2003a) treatment of de re attitudes. It should be noted, though, that P&S propose a different LF for OC complements, involving pronoun-movement, which derives the obligatory de se reading as in the property view of Chierchia 1990. The agreement problem, therefore, extends to their analysis as well.
- 17.
Other important contrasts between logophoric and predicative control also follow, like the tolerance to partial, split or implicit control. I also do not elaborate here on the specific semantics of nonattitude control verbs, although there are obvious differences between the different subclasses in (20). These matters are discussed in Landau 2015.
- 18.
The notation [±Att] is merely intended to label the semantic type of the complement and should not be thought of as a grammatical feature.
- 19.
The existence of “default agreement” does not undermine this condition. On the contrary, default agreement is blocked whenever standard agreement is applicable, precisely because spellout rules favor ϕ-valued inputs.
- 20.
There is an interesting analogy between the sharing/matching distinction on the PF side and the binding/accidental coindexing on the LF side, whose consequences I cannot pursue here.
- 21.
It is indeed hard to imagine how long-distance, effectively unbounded dependencies of variable binding can be interpreted in a cyclic fashion. I am also not aware of any syntactic evidence for cyclic effects in this area (unlike, say, visible cyclic effects of Ā-movement; see Boeckx 2007).
- 22.
Nonattitude OC verbs select unsaturated properties. The clearest evidence for this is the fact that these verbs universally resist uncontrolled lexical subjects in their complement (Grano 2015), and indeed, it is often impossible to imagine what they could mean with a propositional complement. Yet they often take inflected complements, as in the following Persian example (Darzi 2008).
i.
Mæni
mi-tun-æm
[(ke) PROi/*j
næ-r-æm
xune].
I
dur-be.able-1gs
(that)
not-go.subj-1sg
home
‘I am able not to go home.’
- 23.
It should be clear that the selective effect of agreement on control is an inescapable problem for any theory of control that is purely semantic (and not just for the property/centered-worlds theory), that is, any theory in which the control dependency is not syntactically represented. For examples of such theories, see Růžička 1999, Jackendoff and Culicover 2003 and Duffley 2014.
- 24.
Heim’s (1994) proposal was to extend the binding domain of the de re pronoun/reflexive by deleting PRO and its binder at LF. Charlow and Sharvit independently show that this proposal is untenable.
- 25.
For a recent account of the “puzzling” BT effects that simultaneously employs local operator binding (for PRO) and a de re concept generator (for the reflexive), see Pearson 2015.
- 26.
“Rule I: NP A cannot corefer with NP B if replacing A with C, C a variable A-bound by B, yields an indistinguishable interpretation” (Reuland 2011: 57).
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Landau, I. (2018). Direct Variable Binding and Agreement in Obligatory Control. In: Patel-Grosz, P., Grosz, P., Zobel, S. (eds) Pronouns in Embedded Contexts at the Syntax-Semantics Interface. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 99. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56706-8_1
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