On the Empirical Scope and Theoretical Status of the OC-NC Generalization

Abstract

The article discusses the OC-NC generalization ( Landau 2004 , 2015 ) that establishes a relationship between the obligatory control nature of a construction and its semantic (tensedness/attitude) and formal (morphological agreement) properties. I discuss three counterexamples attested in languages of the Caucasus and demonstrate that complements of desiderative verbs in these languages violate predictions of the generalization: agreeing tensed complements instantiate obligatory control, or uninflected tensed complements are noncontrolled. I also give references to other potential counterexamples and discuss issues raised by the empirical evidence, ultimately arguing that no such typological universal holds.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 36 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.