Whamit!

Speaker: Wataru Uegaki
Title: Controller shift in centered-world semantics
Time: Thursday, February 10, 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461

(This is a practice talk for the workshop “Grammar of Attitudes” at
the 33rd meeting of DGfS to be held on February 23rd at University of
Göttingen.)

English control shift (CS) (Hust & Brame 1976) is a phenomenon where
the understood subject of an obligatory control complement corresponds
to an argument that is different from the verb’s ordinary controller,
as exemplified in (1).

1. a. John_i was promised by Mary_j PRO_i to be allowed to perjure himself_i.
   b. John_i asked Mary_j PRO_i to be allowed to leave.

In this talk, I will argue that this long-standing problem can be
given a straightforward analysis within the centered-world analysis of
attitude ascription (cf. e.g., Lewis 1979), which is independently
motivated to deal with the semantics of de se attitude reports. The
basic proposals are the following: (i) the participants of the event
predicated of by the control complement must consist of the
counterparts of those of the matrix attitude (i.e. obligatory de se
reading), (ii) the lexical semantics of “subject/object control” verbs
are such that their subject/object arguments correspond to the agent
of the complement event, (iii) In CS, the complement contains an
implicit agent argument in addition to PRO, which makes the complement
denote a ‘double-centered’ proposition with both the author-center and
the addressee-center. Among these, (i) and (ii) apply to obligatory
control in general, and only (iii) is the proposal specific to CS. In
the talk, I will show how this system allows a straightforward
analysis of CS, and discuss its implications.