PRO theory

Abstract

Control theory has received a lot of attention from syntacticians and semanticists on a par such as Chomsky (1965), Rosenbaum (1967), Hornstein (1997, 1999), Boeckx and Hornstein (2003), Landau (2003), Culicover and Willinks (1986) and Culicover and Jackendoff (2001) to name but some. We attempt to investigate the controversial phenomenon of control in Standard Arabic (SA). The paper sheds some light on Standard Arabic grammar and shows how Rosenbaum's Minimal Distance Principle is violated by the Arabic elaborate morphological system. We try to illustrate that control behaves differently depending on the language in question and that syntactic and semantic analyses cannot be employed in a language that is structurally different from English. One of these distinct differences is that Arabic syntax employs a silent element, viz., pro instead of the anaphoric PRO.