Whamit!

Speaker: Wataru Uegaki
Title: Controller shift in centered-world semantics
Time: Thursday, February 10, 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461

(This is a practice talk for the workshop “Grammar of Attitudes” at the 33rd meeting of DGfS to be held on February 23rd at University of Göttingen.)

English control shift (CS) (Hust & Brame 1976) is a phenomenon where the understood subject of an obligatory control complement corresponds to an argument that is different from the verb’s ordinary controller, as exemplified in (1).

1. a. John_i was promised by Mary_j PRO_i to be allowed to perjure himself_i.
   b. John_i asked Mary_j PRO_i to be allowed to leave.

In this talk, I will argue that this long-standing problem can be given a straightforward analysis within the centered-world analysis of attitude ascription (cf. e.g., Lewis 1979), which is independently motivated to deal with the semantics of de se attitude reports. The basic proposals are the following: (i) the participants of the event predicated of by the control complement must consist of the counterparts of those of the matrix attitude (i.e. obligatory de se reading), (ii) the lexical semantics of “subject/object control” verbs are such that their subject/object arguments correspond to the agent of the complement event, (iii) In CS, the complement contains an implicit agent argument in addition to PRO, which makes the complement denote a ‘double-centered’ proposition with both the author-center and the addressee-center. Among these, (i) and (ii) apply to obligatory control in general, and only (iii) is the proposal specific to CS. In the talk, I will show how this system allows a straightforward analysis of CS, and discuss its implications.