The overgeneration problem and the case of semipredicatives in Russian 21
From (14a) Landau concludes that case transmission from objects is optional, from
(14b) he concludes that case transmission over čtoby is optional, from (14c, d) he con-
cludes that case transmission over an indirect object is optional, and from (14e–g) he
concludes that case transmission to inside of V+N collocations varies.
Landau’s work thus highlights the existence, often swept under the rug, of mixed
judgments in certain constructions. What this means is that, alongside the core OC
cases in which only route A is possible and the core arbitrary control cases in which
only route B is possible, there is a residue of ambiguous cases in which both routes are
available.
- Some alternative approaches
This section presents some alternative approaches to control and the case of predicate
adjectives. This will lay the groundwork for a more detailed comparison in Section 4,
from the perspectives of larger issues such as locality, overgeneration, and the mechan-
ics of case, and will also inform the eventual analysis in Section 6. In my view, each
approach has much to commend it but also encounters conceptual or mechanical prob-
lems. From the vast literature I will consider four different systems. These touchstones
are (i) Babby’s vertical binding system, (ii) Hornstein’s movement theory of control, (iii)
Landau’s minimalist-oriented approach, and (iv) Franks’s GB-oriented approach.
In broader terms, these can be categorized according to the way they conceive of
PRO. For Franks (1995), PRO was necessarily caseless and the SD was directly assigned to
the semipredicative.^8 Since then accounts have uniformly adopted a special PRODAT ele-
ment; this is explicit for Babby and Landau and implicit (but subsequently confirmed in
p.c.) in Grebenyova’s (2005) application of Hornstein’s model to Russian. As we shall see
in Section 4.1, the underappreciated problem of how agreement under OC works is where
the approaches differ most. For Babby, there is no OC PRO. Instead he extends Williams’s
(1994) “Vertical-Binding” (VB) account of control of adjunct modifiers to OC. Under
the “movement theory of control” (MTC) there is similarly no OC pronominal either,
the subject instead being the trace of A-movement. Under Landau’s minimalist account
OC PRO receives its case from the same matrix probe that also values the case of PRO’s
controller. In Franks (1995) I did not explicitly address the issue of OC PRO, beyond the
assumption that OC PRO, as an anaphor, could (by virtue of a chain of indices) transmit
the case of its antecedent to the predicate adjective.
- I will try to defend these ideas below, but combining them with insights of the MTC
model. Note that by Franks (1998) I had moved to a more minimalist “null Case” analysis,
which involved checking through movement of PRO’s case features to its controller, curi-
ously presaging the MTC model. Laurençot (1997) was probably the first to posit PRODAT for
Russian.