Jaume Solà i Pujols - Departament de Filologia Catalana ...

(25) Votar en Joan, em sembla que ni ell mateix
To-vote-for the J. me-seems that not-even he SELF
s'imagina que t'ho proposessis
guesses that you-intended
'Vote for Joan, I think not even he himself could guess you intended to"
In 0 BT requires en Joan not to be c-commanded by ell mateix, whereas the controlled
PRO in the dislocated infinitival clause would have to be c-commanded by the subject of t'ho
proposessis 'you intended to' if control is to be reduced to binding. In whatever level of
representation one requirement is met, the other is not.
In addition, I have serious doubts that control can be reduced to purely structural
conditions: at least for typical control verbs (hope, convince, etc.) there seem to be irreducible
semantic or lexical factors (consider, e.g., persuade and promise) on the determination of the
controller. 116 A sad conclusion though it may be, control seems to remain a poorly understood
field of the grammar. What can easily be determined on a structural basis is only the controllee,
not the controller. Our proposal, as the standard ones, will capture this fact.
Summing up, Kayne's hypothesis appears problematic for at least the following reasons:
- it challenges the structure preserving hypothesis concerning adjunction: a head is
adjoined to a X'.
116 There is a recent proposal by Larson (1991) which tries
to derive whether the object or the subject is the controller
from purely structural (c-command) conditions. Although
plausible for some basic cases, the proposal is bound to adopt
rather prolix assumptions to cover only the English data. In
addition, the minimal contrast he postulates between objects ccommanding
and not c-commanding the infinitive should optimally
be derived from some Universal Theta Assignment Hypothesis, for
they are unlikely to be learned and, in addition, object/subject
control status seems to be relatively uniform for synonymous
verbs across languages.
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