SEMANTIC AND SYNTACTIC FACTORS IN CONTROL 189(48) a. John asked Bill what to do in such a situation.
b. John asked the professor how to solve the problem using the
theorem.In both (48a) and (48b), the controller can be the subject John, an
unspecified group, which includes John, or it can be arbitrary, the "how to"
or "what to" being the same for anyone, not just the particular group in
which the speech act occurs. In contrast to persuade /promise-type construc
tions, there is no unique and necessary controller. Hence this is not an
instance of obligatory control. In such structures, the controller may be the
matrix actor, as determined by speech act factors, or it may be a delimited
group which includes the matrix actor, as determined by pragmatic factors
or context, or the controller may be arbitrary. The arbitrary or generic
interpretation may also depend on the presence of appropriate pragmatic
factors, which make such a reading plausible.
Note that in the passive version of (48a), shown in (49), the actor has
been deleted and there is a stronger sense of the arbitrary reading than in
the active version.
(49) Bill was asked what to do.
However, the arbitrary reading is not the exclusive interpretation. We
might embed such an example in a context where contextual or situational
information would suggest that the controller is the missing actor or a group
which includes the actor. Even if there is no controller argument available
syntactically, the same three readings are still available.
The strongest example of an arbitrary reading with indirect questions is
evidenced in examples such as (50).
(50) a. What to do is the question.
b. The question is what to do.
In these examples, the semantics and pragmatics of the sentence alone do
not suggest a possible controller, and control appears to be arbitrary. How
ever, it is possible that given an appropriate context or situation the con
troller of the utterance may be interpreted as the speaker, or perhaps as a
group including the speaker, whoever it is that we know to be wondering
"what to do", and responsible for "the doing". The pragmatics of the situa
tion or contextual information provides this interpretation. Note that we
have the same three choices of interpretation of the controller as we did in
(48a), though perhaps the strength of each interpretation varies across the
two examples.