“Collaborative Research: Variation in Exceptive Structures”

This National Science Foundation-funded project is joint work with Maria Polinsky at the University of Maryland. The project time period is 2021 – 2025.

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“Collaborative Research: Variation in Control Structures”. This National Science Foundation-funded project was joint work with Maria Polinsky at Harvard University. The project time period was March 2002 to August 2006.

Control constructions have been at the fore of syntactic and semantic theorizing for the last thirty years, and the research into the syntax and semantics of Control constructions has led to important results in the domain of clausal complementation. Most theoretical research on Control has built heavily on the facts of English and a small number of other well-studied, typologically similar languages. Such theories of Control account for the canonical English Control pattern, Sandy tried _ to remain calm.The core property of this construction is a Forward Control relation: an obligatory interpretational dependency between an overt argument NP and a lower unpronounced argument in the complement clause. In the proposed study, we will investigate variation in the structural realization of this Control relation which we believe is cross-linguistically attested and which we also believe has important implications for syntactic theory. A Backward Control relation is a similar, obligatory interpretational dependency in which the overt argument NP is in the lower position and the higher argument is unpronounced. Backward Control has been proposed in the literature for constructions in Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Tsez (Nakh-Dagestanian), Korean, Malagasy, and other languages.

The goal of this project is to explore the empirical and theoretical issues surrounding Backward Control phenomena. In the empirical domain, we will further document Backward Control constructions cross-linguistically. We will carry out in-depth investigations of attested Backward Control structures across several selected languages and, with the aid of graduate and undergraduate research assistants, we will seek out additional examples and simultaneously develop a database of control patterns in selected language families. In the theoretical domain, we will examine the implications of our empirical findings for existing theories of Control and for syntactic theory more generally. Theoretical work will center on whether or not current theories permit the structures that we document and, if they do not, what modifications are necessary to permit the range of observed variation while still maintaining restrictiveness. Overall, the proposed project will contribute to an understanding of the range of variation in Control structures that are attested in natural language.

Control questionnaire at the Max Planck Typological tools for field linguistics website