Control and Restructuring

This book investigates the phenomenon of control structures, configurations in which the subject of the embedded clause is missing and is construed as coreferential with the subject of the embedding clause (e.g. John wanted to leave). It draws on data from English, Mandarin Chinese, and Modern Greek to investigate the relationship that control bears both to restructuring - the phenomenon whereby some apparently biclausal structures behave as though they constitute just one clause - and to the meanings of the embedding predicates that participate in these structures.

Thomas Grano argues that restructuring is cross-linguistically pervasive and that, by virtue of its co-occurrence with some control predicates but not others, it serves as evidence for a basic division within the class of complement control structures. This division is connected to how the semantics of the control predicate interacts with general principles of clausal architecture and of the syntax-semantics interface. His findings have general implications both for clausal structure and for the relationship between form and meaning in natural language.

Thomas Grano, Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Indiana University, Indiana University

Thomas Grano is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Indiana University. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2012, and he specializes in semantics and syntax, with particular attention to clausal complementation, gradability and comparison, and Mandarin Chinese. His work has appeared in journals such as Journal of East Asian Linguistics, Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, and Natural Language Semantics.

1. Introduction
2. Exhaustive control as functional restructuring
3. The semantics of restructuring: Verb meaning, variable binding, and clausal architecture
4. Explaining the mixed properties of want
5. Control, restructuring, and temporal interpretation
6. Control and restructuring in Mandarin Chinese
7. Control and restructuring in Greek
8. Conclusion