The overgeneration problem and the case of semipredicatives in Russian 25
The subtree in (19) reflects the use of InfP in Babby (2009): in addition to provid-
ing an adjunction site for the semipredicative, [Spec,InfP] hosts PRODAT. This can be
compared to his 1998 analysis, which uses a distinct category, S, to introduce PRODAT,
as in (15b). I argue below that the more recent system actually obscures an important
insight inherent in his original one.
Despite its initial conceptual appeal, Babby’s VB approach raises certain ques-
tions. One, as pointed out by an anonymous reviewer, concerns the dubious virtue
of eliminating PRO in certain cases but not in others. Does restricting rather than
eliminating PRO buy us anything? A second major issue, which Babby’s work shares
with all null Case systems, is what it means for PRO to be dative and why it cannot
be overt. In particular, how is PROdat different from an overt dative subject? A third
set of problems is more specific to the details of the analysis in his book, because he
adopts various functional projections at various points in the presentation and it is
unclear how these relate to each other or to more familiar ones. For example, what
happens to TP if the system employs InfP (presumably for [–tense] TP), why does
Babby employ [Spec, vP] to introduce an overt (lexical) subject but [Spec,InfP] for
PRO, and most importantly, what does it mean to have two different kinds of InfP
(differing only in whether they have a filled specifier or not)? I will return to this last
issue in Section 4, when the various approaches are assessed from the perspective of
the overgeneration problem.
3.2 Control as movement
Under the VB approach, the single argument Ivan in (16) bears both the Experiencer
role as external argument of xočet and the Agent role as external argument of pisat’.
Another way of obtaining this result can be found in the model of control in Hornstein
(2001). He proposes that PRO be reanalysed as the trace of NP-movement, under a
system that allows movement into theta-positions. His MTC gives (16) a structure as
in (20), with the lower copy of Ivan struck through because it is not pronounced:
(20) Ivani xočet [Ivani pisat’ pismo].
Ivan wants (Ivan) write.inf letter
‘Ivan wants to write a letter.’
For current purposes, the difference between Babby’s and Hornstein’s approaches is
twofold: (i) whether or not the infinitive has an independent subject position in OC
constructions and (ii) whether the multiple theta-roles a single argument receives are
assigned at once, or in the course of the derivation. It is the first difference that con-
cerns us here.
Under most bottom-up models of control, including those of Babby and Lan-
dau (see Section 3.3), the case of the ultimate OC controller is not available until that