The null embedded subject (PRO) in nonfinite complements of verbs of thought/desire/ communication bears a unique 1st or 2nd person perspective on the embedded event; thus, John decided [PRO to pay the fine] means that John entertained the thought “I will pay the fine”, while Mary told John [PRO to pay the fine] means that Mary told John “You should pay the fine”. Recent years have seen intensive research on the syntax and semantics of a family of related constructions: Logophoric pronouns, long-distance reflexives, indexical shift, allocutive agreement and upward C-agreement. In all of them, a dependent element in the complement clause (PRO, reflexive, pronoun or agreement marker) registers the perspective of a participant in a higher mental/speech event. A growing consensus holds that this dependence is mediated by a “ghostly (null) DP/operator”, located at the edge of the complement clause (Speas and Tenny 2003, Speas 2004, Adesola 2005, Anand 2006, Collins and Postal 2012, Nishigauchi 2014, Shklovsky and Sudo 2014, Pearson 2015, Alok and Baker 2018, Park 2018, Sundaresan 2018, 2025, Charnavel 2019, 2020, Deal 2020, Baker and Ikawa 2024, Baker 2024).

In this course, we will develop a skeletal model of Obligatory Control (OC) that is informed by this body of research. In particular, we will pursue the idea that OC expresses an indexical perspective because it literally implicates an indexical ghostly DP, expanding on the analysis of Jussive clauses in Korean and Japanese, which impose OC in complement positions (Madigan 2008, Pak et al. 2008, Zanuttini et al. 2012, Matsuda 2019). The model assimilates the basic two-tiered architecture of Landau 2015, but crucially differs in that the OC complement is projected from a Mood head, hosting the ghostly DP; the latter is a kind of imposter pronominal, displaying a mismatch between its notional (indexical) [person] and grammatical [person]. We will discuss how this model can illuminate classical as well as more recently documented properties of OC (de se, partial control, overt controllee, etc.).

References

Adesola, Oluseye. 2005. Pronouns and Null Operators: Ā-dependencies and Relations in Yoruba. PhD dissertation, Rutgers University.

Alok, Deepak, and Baker, Mark. 2018. On the Mechanics (Syntax) of Indexical Shift: Evidence from Allocutive Agreement in Magahi. Ms., Rutgers University.

Anand, Pranav. 2006. De De se. PhD dissertation, MIT.

Baker, Mark. 2024. Complementizers Relating to Noun Phrases: Rare Constructions within a Theory of Universal Grammar. Ms, Rutgers University.

Baker, Mark, and Ikawa, Shiori. 2024. Control Theory and the Relationship between Logophoric Pronouns and Logophoric Uses of Anaphors. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 42: 897-954.

Charnavel, Isabelle. 2019. Locality and Logophoricity: A Theory of Exempt Anaphora. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Charnavel, Isabelle. 2020. Logophoricity and Locality: a View from French Anaphors. Linguistic Inquiry 51: 671-724.

Collins, Chris, and Postal, Paul M. 2012. Imposters : A Study of Pronominal Agreement. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Deal, Amy Rose. 2020. A Theory of Indexica Shift: Meaning, Grammar and Crosslinguistics Variation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Landau, Idan. 2015. A Two-Tiered Theory of Control. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Madigan, Sean. 2008. Control Constructions in Korean, PhD dissertation, University of Delaware.

Matsuda, Asako. 2019. Person in Partial Control. PhD dissertation, Ochanomizu University. Nishigauchi,

Taisuke. 2014. Reflexive Binding: Awareness and Empathy from a Syntactic Point of View. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 23: 157-206.

Pak, Miok, Portner, Paul, and Zanuttini, Raffaella. 2008. Agreement in Promissive, Imperative, and Exhortative Clauses. Korean Linguistics 14: 157-175.

Park, Yangsook. 2018. Attitudes de se and Logophoricity. PhD dissertation, UMASS.

Pearson, Hazel. 2015. The Interpretation of the Logophoric Pronoun in Ewe. Natural Language Semantics 23: 77-118.

Shklovsky, Kirill, and Sudo, Yasutada. 2014. The Syntax of Monsters. Linguistic Inquiry 45: 381-402.

Speas, Margaret. 2004. Evidentiality, Logophoricity and Syntactic Representation of Pragmatic Features. Lingua 114: 255-276.

Speas, Peggy, and Tenny, Carol. 2003. Configurational Properties of Point of View Roles. In Asymmetry in Grammar 1, ed. by Anna Maria Di Sciullo, 315-344. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Sundaresan, Sandhya. 2018. Perspective is Syntactic: Evidence from Anaphora. Glossa 3(1): 128:1-40w. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.81.

Sundaresan, Sandhya. 2025. Perspectival Anaphora: A Case Study from Tamil. In The Oxford Handbook of Dravidian Languages, ed. by Raghavachari Amritavallim and Bhuvana Narasimhanm. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Zanuttini, Rafaella, Pak, Miok, and Portner, Paul. 2012. A Syntactic Analysis of Interpretive Restrictions on Imperative, Promissive, and Exhortative Subjects. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. 30: 1231–1274.