Chapter 5 - Verb Phrases(183) a the purpose of the witnesses claim that the defendant paid a lot of money was
to attract attention to the defendant
b the witness claimed the purpose of the defendant paying a lot of money was
to attract attention to the witness
We can account for this in the following way. We know from chapter 3 that
reflexive pronouns must refer to something within their own clause and in (182) the
only thing that could be the referent of the reflexive is the missing subject. The
missing subject is in turn controlled by some other element in the clause and hence
limitations on the reference of the reflexive indicate limitations on the control of the
subject. When the purpose clause modifies the higher verb, only the subject of this
verb can act as the controller and hence be the ultimate referent of the reflexive. It
seems that the subject of the other clause is ‘too low down’ in the clause to act as
controller. On the other hand, this subject can act as controller when the purpose
clause modifies the lower verb.
Having established that there are structural conditions on what can act as a
controller, consider the following examples:
(184) a Harry hired Freda [to fire the security guard]
b Harry fired Freda [to hire the security guard]
(184a) is ambiguous in terms of who is doing the firing: it could be Harry or Freda.
(184b) is not ambiguous however as here only Harry can do the hiring. What can
account for this difference? We have seen that the structural position of the purpose
clause affects what can be the controller and so it might be that there are different
possible positions for the purpose clause within the structure. The structure of the main
VP in (184a) is as follows:
(185) vP
DP v'
Harry v VP
e DP V'
Freda V
hire
As agent, Harry is the specifier of an agentive light verb and as theme Freda is the
specifier of the main verb. The verb will move to support the light verb as usual. We
know in this case, the purpose clause can either be controlled by the subject or the
object and so it must be able to attach to the structure high enough to allow subject
control and low enough to allow object control. Suppose we assume that the purpose
clause can adjoin either to the v' or to the V':