TY - JOUR
T1 - Two Routes of Control: Evidence from Case Transmission in Russian
AU - Landau, Idan
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgements This article has benefited from the comments of Steven Franks, the audiences at the linguistics colloquium of UCSC (October 2006) and GLOW 31 (Newcastle, March 2008), and three anonymous NLLT reviewers. I am grateful to Pavel Riazanov for conducting the interviews with the Russian informants and helping me in coding the results, and to Alexandra Beytenbrat for clarifying to me some murky issues in the Russian case system. The research reported here was supported by the Israeli Science Foundation (grant No. 27/05).
PY - 2008/11/1
Y1 - 2008/11/1
N2 - The unpronounced subject of infinitives, PRO, bears standard case, which is reflected on agreeing predicative elements in languages like Russian, Icelandic, Ancient Greek, etc. This case can be independent from the case of the controller DP, or identical to it ('case transmission'). We report the findings of a novel study of case transmission in Russian, based on data collected from 30 speakers. The findings contradict some key generalizations that have gone unchallenged in the field for decades; specifically, case transmission is much more prevalent than previously assumed, often co-occurring with the option of independent case. The pattern of case transmission is determined by the interaction of a complex set of factors-the grammatical function of the controller, the shape of the complementizer, the type of control relation (exhaustive or partial), and more. The proposed analysis builds on "The Agreement Model of Obligatory Control (OC)" (Landau 2000, 2004, 2006) and strongly supports the claim that OC exploits two routes-either a direct Agree relation with PRO, or one mediated by the infinitival C. It is derivationally local and free of the "look-ahead" properties inherent to earlier accounts. Finally, we provide a description of the documented crosslinguistic variation in this domain, and situate it within a tight typological model.
AB - The unpronounced subject of infinitives, PRO, bears standard case, which is reflected on agreeing predicative elements in languages like Russian, Icelandic, Ancient Greek, etc. This case can be independent from the case of the controller DP, or identical to it ('case transmission'). We report the findings of a novel study of case transmission in Russian, based on data collected from 30 speakers. The findings contradict some key generalizations that have gone unchallenged in the field for decades; specifically, case transmission is much more prevalent than previously assumed, often co-occurring with the option of independent case. The pattern of case transmission is determined by the interaction of a complex set of factors-the grammatical function of the controller, the shape of the complementizer, the type of control relation (exhaustive or partial), and more. The proposed analysis builds on "The Agreement Model of Obligatory Control (OC)" (Landau 2000, 2004, 2006) and strongly supports the claim that OC exploits two routes-either a direct Agree relation with PRO, or one mediated by the infinitival C. It is derivationally local and free of the "look-ahead" properties inherent to earlier accounts. Finally, we provide a description of the documented crosslinguistic variation in this domain, and situate it within a tight typological model.
KW - Case transmission
KW - Obligatory control
KW - PRO
KW - Partial control
KW - Russian syntax
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=57149119716&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s11049-008-9054-0
DO - 10.1007/s11049-008-9054-0
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:57149119716
SN - 0167-806X
VL - 26
SP - 877
EP - 924
JO - Natural Language and Linguistic Theory
JF - Natural Language and Linguistic Theory
IS - 4
ER -