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Control vs. complex predication

Identifying non-finite complements

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Abstract

This paper comments on Davison’s (2013) analysis of the Hindi/Urdu permissive as: (1) a control construction with an ‘allow to do’ reading; (2) an ecm construction with an ‘allow to happen’ reading. The paper reiterates Butt’s (1995) original reasons for positing a complex predicate analysis of the ‘allow to do’ permissive and extends the analysis to the ‘allow to happen’ reading of the permissive. The argumentation covers different theoretical perspectives and brings out issues with respect to finiteness and different degrees of embedding that pertain to how “tight” a given predication ranging over subevents is. The paper argues that events embedded under a control or raising predicate are less tightly connected to the matrix verb/event than is the case in complex predication and that the different degrees of cohesion between events must be understood as reflecting embedding within different modules of grammar.

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Notes

  1. The list of abbreviations used in this paper is: Acc=Accusative, Caus=Causative, Dat=Dative, Dem=Demonstrative, Erg=Ergative, F=Feminine, Fam=Familiar, Fut=Future, Gen=Genitive, Imp=Imperative, Ipf=Imperfect, Ind=Indicative, Inst=Instrumental, M=Masculine, Nom=Nominative, Obl=Oblique, Obj=Objective, Pf=Perfect, Pl=Plural, Pres=Present, Pron=Pronoun, Sg=Singular. A ‘-’ indicates a morpheme boundary, a ‘=’ a clitic boundary.

  2. Note that Hindi speakers tend to prefer a version in which the instructee is marked with the instrumental/comitative se rather than the ko shown in (5).

  3. The precise representation of semantic roles at a-structure is the subject of on-going debate, as is the precise formulation of lfg’s Mapping or Linking Theory (see Butt 2006 for an overview). For the purposes of this paper, I abstract away from the details and use thematic role labels and the standard formulation of linking in Bresnan (2001).

  4. The analyses in (13), (15) and (17) also illustrate that auxiliaries merely contribute functional information to the f-structure—the information contained under tns-asp. This reflects their status as functional, non-predicational elements (Butt et al. 2004).

  5. The predication in (22) is a V-V complex predicate of a type that occurs with high frequency in Hindi/Urdu. The finite light verb adds aspectual and Aktionsart information (telicity) to the overall predication without which the event description is often deemed to be “incomplete” by native speakers. See a.o. Hook (1974), Butt (1995), Butt and Ramchand (2005) for some further discussion.

  6. Bhatt works with Wurmbrand’s (2001) notion of restructuring, which covers several phenomena that are actually quite different. She makes a distinction between two types of restructuring: (1) Functional Restructuring (basically clauses with auxiliaries); (2) Lexical Restructuring (basically phenomena otherwise known as complex predication or clause union; Aissen and Perlmutter 1983; Alsina 1997). However, the bulk of her argumentation pertains to German coherent verbs, which are actually neither complex predicates in the Romance sense (and the sense used here), nor auxiliary constructions, but some kind of special raising or control construction. See Reis and Sternefeld (2004) for a comprehensive discussion of the German data with respect to Wurmbrand (2001).

  7. Hindi/Urdu is a split-ergative language in which the ergative marks subjects of (di)transitive agentive verbs when the verb carries perfect morphology, as in (1). A handful of intransitive unergative verbs also optionally allow for the ergative (Davison 1999).

  8. Davison notes that the Dative Restriction also applies to participles as in (i) and takes this as further evidence of the syntactic nature of this constraint. However, consider (ii), which is grammatical. The difference is that the noun ‘man’ that is non-nominative in (ii) and as such no clash ensues. So it is not a restriction on dative pro per se.

    figure u

  9. This thematic hierarchy is based on original observations by Kiparsky (1987). As Bresnan (2001:321) points out, the ordering of the arguments might also be derived from semantic primitives in lexically decomposed structures, as in Jackendoff’s (1990) proposals, for example. Another option is the type of lexical semantic decomposition practiced in First Phase Syntax, for example, Ramchand (2008).

  10. Both Argument Fusion and Raising are independently documented. Baker and Harvey (2010) provide a crosslinguistic survey of complex predication and conclude that there are two major types: coindexation (my Fusion) and merger (analogous to Argument Raising).

  11. The verb ‘come’ here is in its version as an experiencer verb. Note that I do not distinguish between beneficiaries, goals and experiencers, but use ‘goal’ as a single cover term.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks go to Gillian Ramchand for judicious application of the carrot-and-stick method, to Alice Davison, Rajesh Bhatt, Gillian Ramchand and two anonymous reviewers for extremely interesting discussions of the subject matter and the data at hand. Many thanks also to Tafseer Ahmed, Ashwini Deo, Ghulam Raza and Qaisar Abbas for providing data judgements, sometimes at very short notice. And finally, to Tom McFadden and Sandhya Sundaresan for helping me along the final stretch in their role as editors.

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  1. Department of Linguistics, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany

    Miriam Butt

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Butt, M. Control vs. complex predication. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 32, 165–190 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-013-9217-5

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