The semantic basis of control in english

Abstract

Our intent here, in the face of a persistent tradition of studying control in purely syntactic terms, is to reiterate the fundamental importance of semantics in the control problem, and to articulate some of the semantic factors more precisely than has heretofore been possible. After presenting familiar obstacles to a theory of control based on syntactic binding, we make a three-way distinction between ‘unique control’ (usually called obligatory control), ‘free control’, and ‘nearly free control’ (the last two falling under traditional nonobligatory control). We show that in a very large class of cases of unique control, the controlled vp denotes an action and the controller is the character who has the onus for that action. This analysis is applied to four major classes of control verbs and their nominals, as well as a class of adjectives, showing that semantic role reliably identifies the controller, and syntactic position does not. Through a formalization in terms of conceptual structure, we begin to be able to explain much of control directly from the lexical decomposition of the matrix verb. Several classes of exceptions to the conditions on unique control are treated as cases of coercion, in which extra conventionalized semantic material is added that is not present in syntax.

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