The Syntax and Semantics of Wanting in Indonesian

The Indonesian verbs mau and ingin ‘want’ look like typical control verbs. When they are followed by a passive predicate however, an additional, unexpected interpretation arises. The sentence Siti mau/ingin di-cium oleh Ali means ‘Siti wants to be kissed by Ali’ but also ‘Ali wants to kiss Siti’. We call the latter interpretation Crossed Control (CC). In CC, the wanter is not the surface subject of ‘want’ but an oblique element in the complement clause and the surface subject is the theme of the embedded predicate and not an argument of ‘want’. For the syntax of CC, we reject clause union and backward control analyses and propose that ‘want’ in this construction is an auxiliary/raising verb that does not assign an external θ-role. We then propose that the control interpretation is encoded in the lexical semantics of the auxiliary. ‘Want’ takes a propositional argument but forces the volitional participant in this event to be construed as an experiencer of wanting. We hypothesize that this approach can be extended to volitional constructions in other languages.Linguistic

Against Covert A-Movement in Russian Unaccusatives

Linguistic

Malagasy Control and Its Theoretical Implications

Few syntactic phenomena have attracted as much attention as Control: a structure in which the overt subject of a dominating clause (the controller) determines the referential properties of an unpronounced subject of its complement clause (the controllee). More than thirty years of research, starting with Rosenbaum 1967, Postal 1970, and Bresnan 1972, have produced several interesting theories of Control and Raising (for a good summary of approaches, see Davies and Dubinsky 2004). At the same time, most studies of Control have built heavily on the facts of English and a small number of other well-studied languages. The goal of this paper is to investigate Control in Malagasy, an Austronesian language spoken in Madagascar that is significantly different from English. We will present and analyze three Subject Control constructions in Malagasy which may provide an argument in favor of a syntactic analysis of Control as movement (Hornstein 1999, 2003). The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 introduces basic facts of Malagasy grammar. Section 3 briefly surveys the contrasting syntactic approaches of Control that we consider. Sections 4 through 7 describe and analyze three different patterns of Control in Malagasy, using two of the patterns to argue for the movement analysis. Section 8 summarizes the results of this work.Linguistic

Expanding the Scope of Control and Raising

This paper presents unusual patterns in raising and control and offers a syntactic account which would validate such patterns. On the empirical side, we present evidence for backward control (data from several languages), backward raising (in Adyghe), copy control (Zapotec, Assamese, Tongan) and copy raising (data from a number of languages). All the unusual cases of raising and control seem to involve an A-movement chain in which the lower, not the higher copy is pronounced, or both copies are spelled out. We also review some constructions which, while superficially resembling backward or copy structure, do not provide any evidence for a movement chain. On the theoretical side, assuming that the more unusual patterns are an empirical reality, linguistic theory should be capable of analyzing them. We present mechanisms from the current Minimalist Program which we believe allow the attested variation.Linguistic

Malagasy Control and Its Theoretical Implications

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