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Share Paper 3710

PIMPing Up Implicit Control
Iva Kovač
182-191 (complete paper or proceedings contents)

Abstract

This paper presents a new generalization about implicit control in the context of passive (building on Pitteroff & Schäfer 2019): iff a type of passive can be construed as impersonal passive with unergative verbs, then it also allows implicit control. The generalization is derived from the featural makeup of the passive implicit agent (PIMP) in different types of passive. The featural composition of PIMP has repercussions for its ability to enter an agreement dependency with T, which in turn serves as a prerequisite for PIMP to control PRO (Van Urk 2013). The paper further discusses cases of apparent implicit control in which wh-extraction from the infinitive is blocked, and suggests that this is due to the infinitive being associated with a placeholder pronoun (cf. Pitteroff & Schäfer 2019), which gives rise to a non-complementation configuration. Apart from providing evidence that agreement plays a crucial role in (at least implicit) control, the proposal lends support to the view that implicit arguments have a place in the syntactic component (e.g., Landau 2010, Bhatt & Pancheva 2017) and that passives may come in different guises (e.g., Legate 2014, Alexiadou et al. 2015, Legate et al. 2020).

Published in

Proceedings of the 40th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
edited by Jiayi Lu, Erika Petersen, Anissa Zaitsu, and Boris Harizanov
Table of contents
Printed edition: $425.00