Seminar: Syntax and Semantics

Control is one of the most long-standing, difficult, well-studied, and basic problems in the syntax-semantics interface. The basic problem can be observed in the simple English sentence Sue tried to open the door: On the surface, a single argument Sue is necessarily interpreted as both as the one who tried and the one who potentially opened the door. How does this interpretational fact come about given a syntactic analysis of the sentence? The literature of control is rich in both comparative and in-depth language-particular studies. Because of its (surface) simplicity and pervasiveness, control has been a domain that implicates fundamental questions about syntax, semantics, and their interface, such as the division of labor between syntax and semantics in accounting for apparent form-meaning mismatches, and the interplay of lexically specified meaning, compositional principles, and contextual factors, and pragmatic reasoning in interpretation. The seminar will cover both classical and contemporary literature on control phenomena in various languages.