Raising control

Abstract

An analysis of control phenomena is offered here based on an extension of the non‐mutative account of raising suggested in Anderson 1997. §2 presents and elaborates on that account, illustrating its crucial aspect from the point of view of the present paper: the role as host for raising of an unsubcategorised‐for unmarked semantic relation (an ‘absolutive’) which is (nevertheless) universally present in predications. In §3 it is proposed that this ‘free absolutive’ also marks the controllers in Bertrand tried to escape and the like as having to have their valency (they need to be complemented by an argument, usually nominal) also satisfied by the subject argument of the dependent infinitive. The different properties of agentive and experiencer control structures are investigated, as well as the distinctive characteristics of want‐verbs and control verbs of communication. And in §4, which mainly provides a brief retrospective overview, there is a suggestion as to how the analysis might be extended to the description of control into circumstantials like the infinitive in John went there to work.