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Share Paper 3634

Embedded Additive Presuppositions under Control: An Operator-Variable Account
Ryan Walter Smith
236-242 (complete paper or proceedings contents)

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel syntax and semantics for apparent association of additive focus particles with the PRO subject of clauses embedded under control verbs (Heim 1992), combining the Movement Theory of Control (Hornstein 1999) and the Operator-Particle theory of focus syntax (Lee 2004; Hirsch 2017; Branan & Erlewine 2020). On the analysis developed here, embedded additive readings are derived by an additive focus operator associating with a copy of the controller DP in the embedded clause. The analysis solves two puzzles for previous work on this topic: the necessary presence of focus marking on the controller of PRO with embedded additive presuppositions, and the availability of embedded additive presuppositions in languages such as Japanese and Persian, in which focus particles attach unambiguously to the controller DP in the matrix clause.

Published in

Proceedings of the 39th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
edited by Robert Autry, Gabriela de la Cruz, Luis A. Irizarry Figueroa, Kristina Mihajlovic, Tianyi Ni, Ryan Smith, and Heidi Harley
Table of contents
Printed edition: $645.00