Advances in Role and Reference Grammar

SEMANTIC AND SYNTACTIC FACTORS IN CONTROL 175

3. A semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic analysis

In this section, I will present an analysis in which control is characterized on
the basis of verb semantics, clause linkage conditions and pragmatic factors.
Hopefully, it will become evident that an approach where control is more
closely linked to the meaning of the predicate avoids some of the problems
inherent in approaches which seek to account for control relations by
purely syntactic or thematic factors.
I propose that it is not thematic roles, nor lexically marked control fea­
tures that determine the controller of an unexpressed argument, but rather
that control facts follow from 1) the meaning of the predicates concerned,
which encode events, 2) the pragmatics of the encoded events, and 3) the
clause linkage conditions, where syntactic facts may signal differences in the
relationship between the events encoded in a complex clause. It is my view
that control is merely a byproduct of the encoding of real-world events and
their shared participants into complex clauses, and that we can best account
for control facts by appealing to the meaning of these events.
I will use as a starting point the Foley and Van Valin analysis of control
relations (FVV 1984), which predicts control relations based on the seman­
tics of the matrix verb. I will show that control cannot be adequately
characterized solely in terms of verb semantics, but must also appeal to syn­
tactic and pragmatic considerations.

3.1 Rationale vs. purpose clauses

That control facts are not merely a matter of the properties of the matrix

verb/clause, but depend crucially on syntactic factors, i.e. complement

type, is evident in the following pair of examples.

(13) a. John bought Mary a piano in order to play it.

b. John bought Mary a piano to play.

Although the matrix unit is identical in both cases, the controller of the

infinitival subject is the matrix subject John in (13a), and the matrix object

Mary in (13b).

Bach (1982) proposes some useful syntactic tests to distinguish

between the two types of infinitival constructions evident above: "rationale

clauses" in (13a), and "purpose clauses" in (13b). First, rationale construc­

tions, or "in order to" clauses, are distinguishable by the fact that they may

be preposed.