31.2203, Review: Linguistic Theories: Landau (2019)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-31-2203. Tue Jul 07 2020. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 31.2203, Review: Linguistic Theories: Landau (2019)

Moderator: Malgorzata E. Cavar (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Student Moderator: Jeremy Coburn
Managing Editor: Becca Morris
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Everett Green, Sarah Robinson, Lauren Perkins, Nils Hjortnaes, Yiwen Zhang, Joshua Sims
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Jeremy Coburn <jecoburn at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: Tue, 07 Jul 2020 17:43:29
From: Dennis Ott [dennis.ott at post.harvard.edu]
Subject: Control in Generative Grammar

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36603877


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-3370.html

AUTHOR: Idan  Landau
TITLE: Control in Generative Grammar
SUBTITLE: A Research Companion
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2019

REVIEWER: Dennis Ott, University of Ottawa

SUMMARY

The book under review here is the 2019 paperback edition of Idan Landau’s
“research companion” to the phenomenon of control, first published in 2013. As
far as this reviewer was able to determine, the book has not been revised or
updated; the pagination is perfectly identical to the original hardback issue.

CHAPTER 1 provides a historical and analytical introduction to the phenomenon
of control, beginning with Rosenbaum’s (1967) Equi-NP deletion rule and the
criticism it met with. While Equi’s downfall initially sparked an analysis of
control complements as bare VPs (an idea that has its roots in Chomsky 1955),
its core idea of a null subject in controlled complement clauses was
eventually revived by the introduction of PRO (“a curious twist of irony,” as
Landau notes). The review of these developments is followed by a summary of
major interpretive and structural raising/control asymmetries, drawing in part
on cross-linguistic evidence. Finally, the chapter introduces what Landau
calls the ‘OC signature,’ a criterion by which he distinguishes obligatory
control (OC) from non-obligatory control (NOC): in OC the controller and the
control clause must be co-dependents of the matrix verb, and PRO is
interpreted as a bound variable. Landau argues that this signature
characterizes all control into complement clauses; apparent cases of NOC
complements are argued to be either nominalized clauses or else misanalyzed
instances of OC. What determines the OC/NOC status of a given control clause
is its position (complement vs. non-complement), its category (clausal vs.
nominal), and finiteness properties.

CHAPTER 2 presents a typology of control theories. Instead of presenting one
after the other, Landau groups approaches anachronistically by their
conceptual orientation. He begins by discussing predication-based theories
that take control infinitivals to be predicates to which the controller is
applied (e.g. Chierchia 1984). He then turns to approaches that attempt to
assimilate (N)OC to binding (e.g. Borer 1989), such that PRO is analyzed as an
anaphoric pronoun of sorts, as well as treatments within lexicalist frameworks
(e.g. Bresnan 1982). The chapter closes with discussions of the Movement
Theory of Control (MTC; Hornstein 1999 et seq.), which attempts to reduce
control to A-movement, and Landau’s (2000 et seq.) own Agree-based theory of
control. Landau discusses the pros and cons of each approach in some detail,
and in addition provides key references as well as suggestions for further
reading.

CHAPTER 3, spanning a mere nine pages, surveys empirical arguments for the
existence of PRO. Landau approaches the issue from a theory-neutral
perspective, considering empirical arguments for the existence of phonetically
null but syntactically real subjects in control clauses in abstraction from
questions of implementation. He discusses two types of arguments, direct and
indirect. The indirect arguments show that control clauses are indeed
clausal-propositional objects, which in turn requires the presence of a
subject; relevant cues are furnished (in some languages) by overt indicators
of clause-hood such as complementizers and finiteness, coordination of control
clauses and indisputably clausal categories, and the availability of
subclausal VP-ellipsis. The direct arguments rely on evidence from secondary
predicates, floating quantifiers, agreement and case concord, binding
locality, partial control with collective predicates and singular controllers,
copy and backward control (where the controlled subject surfaces overtly), and
the inability of PRO to appear as an expletive subject (which derives from
interpretive properties of PRO, which however can only be stated once its
existence is granted). The facts Landau reviews as direct arguments could not
be readily captured or even stated by a subject-less analysis of control
clauses or by analyzing the controlled subject as a mere implicit (semantic)
argument. On the other hand, they are readily explained once the existence of
controlled null subjects is acknowledged (regardless of their ultimate
analysis).

CHAPTER 4 is devoted to the distribution of PRO: under what conditions is PRO
licensed in a given clause, and in what positions can it occur in those
environments that license it? Landau discusses three traditional ‘textbook
generalizations’ about PRO’s distribution and shows that all of them are
mistaken, or at least dubious: contrary to popular belief and revealed by
cross-linguistic investigations, there is control into finite clauses (in
Hebrew and Balkan languages, among others), and PRO is case-marked; PRO can be
overtly realized; and it is at best unclear that its confinement to subject
position is absolute. From this vantage point Landau proceeds to review
mainstays of classical control theory, such as Chomsky’s (1981) PRO Theorem
and later approaches based on a special ‘null case’ for PRO, which invariably
fail to account for control into finite clauses and the fact, revealed by case
concord in Icelandic and other languages, that PRO is in fact regularly
case-marked. Building on his own previous work (Landau 2004), Landau argues
that OC is best understood as an elsewhere configuration that obtains when
semantic tense or morphological inflection or both are absent from a
non-deficient complement clause. Finally, Landau discusses potential cases of
control of non-subjects (Tagalog ‘actor control’) and overtly realized
controllees (including in ‘backward’ and ‘copy’ control constructions), which
again defy traditional assumptions.

CHAPTER 5 explores in greater depths the different manifestations of OC. At
over 90 pages, the chapter is the most substantial of the entire book,
reflecting the enormous attention OC has received in the literature vis-à-vis
other types of control. Landau begins the chapter with a thorough discussion
of semantic and syntactic theories of controller choice and the problems they
face. These include the notorious issue of “control shift,” showing that
controller choice is not entirely fixed for at least some verbs: compare
object control in “Susie persuaded the teacher [(PRO) to leave early]” to
subject control in “Susie persuaded the teacher [(PRO) to be allowed to leave
early]” (unavailable in “Susie forced the teacher [(PRO) to be allowed to
leave early]”). The problem is compounded by the fact that there is ample
cross-linguistic variation, leading Landau to surmise that control in those
languages that permit control shift rather liberally is “constrained by
pragmatics more than syntax” (p. 137). Consequently, syntactocentric
descendants of Rosenbaum’s (1967) Minimal-distance Principle fare poorly, by
design as it were, when it comes to accommodating such facts. The chapter is
completed by detailed discussions of partial, split and implicit control, the
PRO-gate phenomenon, and control in the nominal domain (which Landau shows
exists minimally in deverbal nominalizations), all of which raise non-trivial
problems for extant approaches to control of any ilk.

CHAPTER 6, the shortest chapter of the book at barely over eight pages, is a
brief discussion of adjunct control, which Landau argues is a heterogeneous
phenomenon. The chapter focuses chiefly on adjuncts that permit OC (such as
result clauses: “Mary grew up [(PRO) to be a famous actress”), although some
questionable cases are included as well; discussion of NOC into adjuncts is
deferred to Chapter 7. Landau rather explicitly sides with predicational
theories of PRO to model adjunct OC, such that “Mary slipped in unnoticed” (no
control) and “Mary slipped in [without (PRO) being noticed]” are essentially
treated analogously.

CHAPTER 7 turns to NOC, as found primarily in subject and clause-initial
adjunct clauses. Landau takes the position that OC and NOC are fundamentally
different phenomena: only OC is a grammatical dependency proper, whereas NOC
aligns with discursive relations, especially logophoricity and topicality. In
NOC, the controller need not be a co-dependent of the control clause (indeed,
it need not c-command PRO); PRO can be interpreted as a free rather than bound
variable; and PRO is necessarily interpreted as referring to a human entity.
The discussion departs from Grinder’s (1970) original study, which paved the
way for a logophoricity-based approach to NOC (although this was neither
intended nor anticipated by Grinder). Landau himself advocates this general
view of NOC, noting the failure of purely structural analyses, such as the MTC
(or modified versions thereof). NOC PRO, he argues (building on observations
dating back to Kuno 1975), is best understood as a logophoric pronoun whose
antecedent is determined by discourse-pragmatic factors.

CHAPTER 8 concludes the book with a few final remarks, highlighting in
particular the heterogeneous picture of control phenomena that emerged
throughout the book (shifting the initial conception of control as a unitary
phenomenon to that of an “aggregate concept”). Overall, Landau views the
evolution and concomitant fragmentation of control theory as a sign of
progress, reflecting advances in related domains.

EVALUATION

As per its official subtitle, this book (henceforth CiGG) is a “research
companion” to the intricate phenomenon of control, which has been at the
forefront of linguistic theorizing within the generative paradigm for some 50
years. A thorough overview of a domain with this long and complex a trajectory
requires exceptional command of a vast amount of literature, conceptual
interrelations, and empirical facts. It is hard to imagine a better candidate
than Idan Landau, aptly declared the “Master of Control” in Sabine Iatridou’s
book blurb, to tackle such an ambitious project, and the result is nothing
short of impressive.

As mentioned at the outset, the 2019 paperback version of CiGG is a verbatim
re-issue of the 2013 hardcover edition. This is remarkable insofar as that the
text has not been updated to include references to Landau’s most recent,
“two-tiered” treatment of control (Landau 2015), which supersedes his own
former Agree-based approach. In its preface, Landau dedicates that book “to
all those who spend years and decades working on the same topic and never stop
marveling at the most elementary puzzles that lured them in the first place.”
The dedication accurately captures the spirit that pervades the pages of the
book under review, which explores the analytical dimensions of a class of
phenomena tied together by the presence of a referentially deficient logical
null subject in a way that vividly reflects the decades Landau has spent
grappling with this problem.

CiGG is not a mere summary of the existing literature on control, nor is it a
typological survey (which, fortunately, is available elsewhere: Stiebels
2007); rather, it is an assessement of the theoretical state of the art. As
such, CiGG does not shy away from evaluation and critique; but Landau’s
relentless exposing of (sometimes fatal) flaws is almost always based on
problematic facts and predictions rather than theoretical predilections and,
commendably, does not exclude his own extensive oeuvre from its scope. It will
not come as a surprise to the reader familiar with Landau’s work that the MTC,
for instance, does not emerge from the discussion as a viable option, but the
adjudication is on the whole fair and balanced, and specific strenghts of the
approach are duly highlighted. While much of the discussion is grounded in
relatively well-known and prominently-discussed facts, it includes a number of
novel observations and references various works that have all but vanished
into oblivion; the discussion of NOC in chapter 7, in particular, is in part
original, owing to the sparsity of research in this area.

CiGG is clearly directed at advanced researchers, and Landau at various points
sacrifices paedagogical simplification and streamlining to empirical
thoroughness and analytical depth. This is not a book that goes out of its way
to be reader-friendly; for instance, “further reading” subsections appear
interspersed throughout the longer chapters, but unfortunately they are mere
lists of references with little guiding commentary. In the book’s conclusion,
Landau reiterates that various “difficult questions” remain unresolved; it
would have been beneficial to explicitly summarize at least the most central
ones, as a sort of roadmap for future research.

Perhaps the strangest aspect of CiGG is its rather imbalanced organization:
some very short chapters, including two at less than ten pages, stand beside
overly lengthy ones; the extensive discussion of OC in Chapters 4 and 5, in
particular, feels like a monograph within the book. While these massive
discrepancies are largely motivated by the uneven attention different aspects
of control have received in the literature, one cannot help but feel that the
organization of the book is gratuitously counterintuitive. The detailed
discussion in Chapters 4 and 5 paints an empirical picture of mind-boggling
complexity, with challenges for every single extant approach to OC that
ultimately calls into question the very existence of a cross-linguistically
unitary phenomenon. The chapter’s excessive length reflects the relevance
Landau attaches to the phenomena discussed (partial, split, and implicit
control, etc.), which have traditionally been sidelined in discussions of
control, but the result is very dense and overall somewhat tedious. Given the
book’s intended audience, I suspect that many readers would have prefered a
more succinct presentation of key points, supplemented with references, to
this slightly overeager review of a large amount of facts and works.

None of the above criticisms diminish the immense value of this book in its
capacity as a research companion. Landau masterfully traces the evolution of
control theory from its necessarily primitive beginnings to the subsequent
developments that led to its gradual decomposition into a family of rather
disparate phenomena. Rather then feeling frustrated by this differentiation,
readers of CiGG are led to comprehend it as a success story, in which “the
novel theoretical notions recruited to shed light on the phenomena were
several degrees of order more fundamental and general than the superficial
labels with which the inquiry had begun” (p. 257)

A dense, technical and thoroughly argued book, CiGG will be highly useful to
researchers and advanced graduate students that need to get up to speed on the
details of control; whatever their specific objectives, they can be certain to
find what they are looking for. (Instructors of graduate classes on control
should compare the book to Davies & Dubinsky 2004, which adopts a more
exegetic, coursebook-type perspective.) Given that the phenomenon of control
is inextricably linked to a host of equally prominent phenomena, CiGG should
thus appeal to a wide range of researchers in formal syntax and semantics. If
Landau’s exceptional achievement inspires future research companions of
comparable depth on other topics aiming to tread in its footsteps, as I expect
it to do, its service to the field will be even greater.

REFERENCES

Borer, H. 1989. Anaphoric AGR. In The Null Subject Parameter, O. Jaeggli and
K. J. Safir (eds.), 69–109. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Bresnan, J. 1982. Control and Complementation. Linguistic Inquiry 13, 343–434.

Chierchia, G. 1984. Topics in the Syntax and Semantics of Infinitives and
Gerunds. PhD dissertation, UMass Amherst.

Chomsky, N. 1955. The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory. Mimeograph,
Harvard/MIT.

Chomsky, N. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter.

Davies, W. D. and S. Dubinsky. 2004. The Grammar of Raising and Control: A
Course in Syntactic Argumentation. Oxford: Blackwell.

Grinder, J. T. 1970. Super Equi-NP Deletion. In Papers from the 6th Regional
Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 297–317. Chicago, IL: Chicago
Linguistic Society. Hornstein, N. 1999. Movement and Control. Linguistic
Inquiry 30, 69–96.

Kuno, S. 1975. Super Equi-NP Deletion is a Pseudo-Transformation. In
Proceedings of NELS 5, 29–44. Amherst, MA: GLSA Publications.

Landau, I. 2000. Elements of Control: Structure and Meaning in Infinitival
Constructions. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Landau, I. 2004. The Scale of Finiteness and the Calculus of Control. Natural
Language & Linguistic Theory 22, 811–877.

Landau, I. 2015. A Two-tiered Theory of Control. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Rosenbaum, P. 1967. The Grammar of English Predicate Complement Constructions.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Stiebels, B. 2007. Towards a Typology of Complement Control. In Studies in
Complement Control: ZAS Working Papers in Linguistics 47, B. Stiebels (ed.),
1–80.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Dennis Ott is associate professor in the Department of Linguistics at the
University of Ottawa, Canada. His research focuses on the formal principles
behind the syntax of natural languages, and how the mental grammar defined by
these principles interfaces with systems of interpretation and articulation.
Specific interests include A'-movement, ellipsis, head movement, locality and
connectivity effects, and the interaction of grammar and pragmatics.





------------------------------------------------------------------------------

***************************    LINGUIST List Support    ***************************
 The 2019 Fund Drive is under way! Please visit https://funddrive.linguistlist.org
  to find out how to donate and check how your university, country or discipline
     ranks in the fund drive challenges. Or go directly to the donation site:
               https://iufoundation.fundly.com/the-linguist-list-2019

                        Let's make this a short fund drive!
                Please feel free to share the link to our campaign:
                    https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/
 


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-31-2203	
----------------------------------------------------------