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Non-canonical Control in a Cross-linguistic Perspective
Edited by Anne Mucha, Jutta M. Hartmann and Beata Trawiński
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 270] 2021
► pp. 137–166

Control from inside

Evidence from Japanese

| Ochanomizu University

Traditional assumptions hold that the reference of complement control PRO is dependent on the reference of a higher argument and that the lexical properties of the embedding predicate are mostly responsible for controller determination. Against such views, this study argues for the possibility that the reference of certain instances of PRO (PC PRO) derives from its own internal structure. The insight comes from Japanese data where certain force suffixes appear in the complements of attitude predicates. These forces are proposed to arise from C-PRO indexical (speaker/addressee) agreement. Similar views have been presented in my previous works (Matsuda 2015a; b, 2017a; b, 2019), with some revisions along the way. This paper provides new supporting data and presents my revised framework.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data
    • 2.1Control as force embedding
    • 2.2Partial control
    • 2.3De se
    • 2.4Nonbiunique selectional relations
    • 2.5Forces in roots
  • 3.Interim summary
  • 4.Extension to English
    • 4.1Subject, object and split control
    • 4.2Partial control
  • 5.How does the force arise clause-internally?
    • 5.1A force-specific head?
    • 5.2Indexical agreement
    • 5.3Creating a de se/te property
  • 6.Associative structure
  • 7.Remaining issues and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 17 September 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.270.05mat
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