Abstract
The classical province of the theory of control lies within what might be grouped together as the phenomena of understood reference for an argument position of a head, where a reference to a thing x is said to be understood with respect to a given position of a given head if there is no expression in that position referring to x, but one takes it that the position is appropriately related to x, either through another independent argument or position in the sentence or discourse in question, or as pragmatically supplied. The phenomena of understood reference, so described, included all cases of “gaps” apart from raising and the movement passive, and specifically include the case of deictically fixed understood reference, as in Emmon Bach’s example (1) (Bach (1977): 147):
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(1)
Here’s a book to read to each other (a handing a book to b and c)
This article stems from a paper prepared for and presented at the MIT Workshop on Control, March, 1989, a revised version of which was published in Rivista di Linguistica 1, 2. I am grateful for remarks by my commentator at the workshop, William Ladusaw, and grateful also to the anonymous referees for Rivista di Linguistica and for the present volume, and to the members of a seminar at MIT co-taught by me and Irene Heim in which the material presented here was discussed; I am particularly indebted to Heim for her careful reading and comments on the earlier published text.
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Notes
For some further discussion, see Higginbotham (1986) and (1989).
Higginbotham (1989) and Chierchia (1989) both discuss the mechanisms involved here.
I am indebted here to Irene Heim, who corrected an error in this article as it appeared in Rivista di Linguistica.
This example was given to me by Tanya Reinhart.
Heim, Lasnik, and May (1988) have illustrated this point with a number of examples.
The implications of these examples can be formulated more precisely as in Carlson (1987).
Chierchia makes this observation, although not in my terminology.
These remarks were prompted by some questions and observations of an anonymous reviewer.
In the literature Reinhart’s proposal is often said to be that pronouns can be “bound variables” or “bound anaphora” even though they are not “bound to quantifiers.” My remarks above may be seen as an effort to make the proposal more intelligible than this terminology would suggest.
Thus expect is unlike, for instance, try, for one could perhaps say that we together gave a try that neither of us gave individually.
An important exception to this generalization is the so-called “paycheck sentences,” stemming from examples due to Karttunen, as in (i): (i) The man who gave his paycheck to his wife was wiser than the man who spent it at the track The acceptability of (i) perhaps derives from a copying process; but I do not know what distinguishes (i) from the unacceptability of covariance in other it-anaphora.
I note here an argument of Chierchia’s in this connection that seems to misfire as an objection to the propositional account. Observing in Chierchia (1990:24) the ambiguities with that-anaphora to a controlled complement, he asks how, if the antecedent is copied into the position of that, covariance is to be obtained (assuming that the copy retains the index of the original). The argument shows, however, at best only that that-anaphora need not involve copying. Chierchia also asks what separates verbs like try, where only covariant or “sloppy” interpretations are available, from verbs like want, which are ambiguous under that-anaphora. The question calls for application of the first of the two caveats of Section 5.1 above: just because it is a verb of strong obligatory control, try is a verb for which, by virtue of its meaning, only covariant interpretation is possible. So nothing need be said about why, say, (i) is unambiguous: (i) John tried jumping, but Bill would never try that.
Thus VP-deletion, at least for some English speakers, need not respect pronominal features, as is shown by the acceptability for them of sentences like “We did our homework, but she didn’t.”
An exception is it, which seems to me to resist demonstrative use.
I am indebted here to discussion with Luigi Rizzi and Luigi Burzio.
I am indebted here to comments from an anonymous reviewer.
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Higginbotham, J. (1992). Reference and Control. In: Larson, R.K., Iatridou, S., Lahiri, U., Higginbotham, J. (eds) Control and Grammar. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 48. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7959-9_3
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