The PROwh connection in modal existential whcons

Authors: Radek Šimík

Publish Date: 2013/10/26

Volume: 31, Issue: 4, Pages: 1163-1205

PDF Link

Abstract

Recent discussion of obligatory control in the literature mostly concentrates on the issue of which syntactic module movement agreement etc is responsible for the establishment of the control relation This paper looks at the issue of control from a higher order perspective Abandoning the presupposition that control constituents denote propositions and that therefore control must be syntactic I deliver an argument in favor of the propertytype analysis of control constituents and by transitivity for a semantic resolution of the control relation The argument comes from modal existential whconstructions and in particular from a strong parallelism between obligatorily controlled PRO and whexpressions It is revealed that PRO and whwords form a natural class to the exclusion of all other types of nominal expressions This is then turned into an argument of treating PRO and whwords essentially as a logical lambdaoperator naturally leading to the property theory of control In addition the article contributes to our understanding of the syntax semantics and typology of modal existential whconstructions It is argued that at least one type of these constructions what I call “control MECs” is embedded minimally by a complex predicate BE+FOR which expresses the state of availability BE which makes it possible for someone to profit FOR from the event characterized by the modal existential whconstructionAn earlier and shorter version of this paper appeared as Šimík 2012a 2012b For financial support I owe thanks to the Ubbo Emmius Fellowship provided by the University of Groningen particularly the Center for Language and Cognition Groningen/CLCG and to the German Research Foundation/DFG particularly the Collaborative Research Center/SFB 632 at the University of Potsdam The research presented in this paper was initiated during the work on my dissertation I would like to thank to my advisors and colleagues from the University of Groningen for their help and support especially Mark de Vries Jan Koster JanWouter Zwart Aysa Arylova and Zhenya Markovskaya The paper was written at the University of Potsdam where I received valuable feedback and advice from Gisbert Fanselow Luis Vicente and Marta Wierzba I also profited from discussions with Mojmír Dočekal and Daniel Hole Ideas from this paper were presented at two conferences Syntax Phonology and Language Analysis SinFonIJA 3 in Novi Sad October 2010 and Formal Description of Slavic Languages FDSL 85 November 2010 I am grateful to the audiences and in the latter case also to two anonymous reviewers of an earlier version of this paper for their critical remarks and observations The paper has undergone a substantial improvement during the NLLT review process I am very grateful to three NLLT anonymous reviewers for their sharp observations and their unwillingness to accept halfbaked arguments The work on this paper would not have been possible without the tremendous help of my informants While most of the data have been collected for the purposes of my dissertation see the acknowledgements there I had to bother a lot of people with further data questions while writing this paper I am grateful to Aysa Arylova Ivano Caponigro Kostadin Cholakov Joseph DeVeaughGeiss Lena Karvovskaya Anikó Lipták Paula MenéndezBenito Maša Močnik Serena Nuzzi Aynat Rubinstein Morag Segal and Luis Vicente All remaining errors and inadequacies are mine

Keywords: