The overgeneration problem and the case of semipredicatives in Russian 29
(28) ?Być w domu samemu i, w dodatku, chorym...
be.inf in home self.dat and in addition sick.inst
‘To be at home by yourself and, in addition, sick ...’
Polish, which behaves similarly to Russian in the relevant respects, shows that it is
something intrinsic to the adjective, rather than the nature of PRO, which determines
whether it defaults to dative or instrumental when agreement is impossible. (28),
which involves a coordination of semipredicative and regular adjective, shows that
not even a case chameleon PRO would work; instead PRO would have to be simulta-
neously dative and instrumental. Moreover, if one stacks these forms in Russian, the
outer one necessarily has wide scope, again demonstrating that semipredicatives are
dative because they are semipredicatives, not because of PRO:
(29) a. Ploxo [byt’ doma odnomu bol’nym]
bad be.inf home alone.dat sick.inst
‘It is bad to be alone at home (when) sick.’
b. Ploxo [byt’ doma bol’nym odnomu].
bad be.inf home sick.inst alone.dat
‘It is bad to be sick at home (when) alone.’
In sum, the MTC seems to share certain problems with Babby’s VB. It does avoid pos-
tulation of PRO, although having a cased but necessarily silent pro in non-OC contexts
does not strike me as an improvement, since it raises similar questions to those noted
above for Babby’s use of PRODAT. Moreover, the problem of why ordinary adjectives
are not dative is more acute for Grebenyova’s MTC-account than for non-movement
solutions. I return to these and related puzzles in Section 5.
3.3 A probe-goal and Agree account
The most traditional approach to control, based in 1980s-style GB, is to treat all infin-
itival clauses similarly and posit a PRO subject in a consistent position within the
clause. This view is retained in its essence in Landau’s (2008) probe-goal and Agree-
based system, in which PRO occupies [Spec, TP]. The technical details of Landau’s
paper are exceedingly complex and cannot be reviewed here. Briefly, he argues that
only OC control is direct from a matrix probe, skipping over C; otherwise – the choice
depending on whether or not C is endowed with φ-features – it is mediated by C,
which (when it has φ-features) checks/values dative case on PRO. Landau (2008: 879)
schematizes “PRO-control” as in (30) and “C-control” as in (31):
(30) ...T/v ... DP ... [CP C [TP PRO[φ] T ...]]
(31) ...T/v ... DP ... [CP C[φ] [TP PRO[φ] T ...]]