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Seeking control in Modern Standard Arabic

Paper · 2017 · Tali Arad Greshler, Nurit Melnik and Shuly Wintner

Summary

The paper asks whether Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) has obligatory control (OC) predicates, meaning verbs that force the unexpressed subject of an embedded clause to be the same as a matrix argument. The focus is on ʔan clauses, whose subjunctive verbs carry agreement. That agreement makes it possible to see whether the embedded subject matches a matrix argument or refers to someone else. The authors searched a corpus for the most likely OC candidates, using criteria from earlier work on MSA and Modern Greek, and backed the search with near-native judgments. Every candidate turned up with disjoint reference, apart from one debatable case. This held even for modals and aspectual verbs, which current control theories predict must be OC. The control distinction does show up in one place: the backward pattern, where the only overt subject sits in the embedded clause. There, coreference with the unexpressed matrix subject is limited to a set of backward control (BC) predicates and leaves traces in agreement. The authors analyse these predicates as optional restructuring verbs that form one complex predicate. This bears on the debate between PRO-based and movement-based theories of control.

Key points

  • MSA is pro-drop, with basic VSO order and possible SVO order. A post-verbal subject triggers partial agreement (gender and person only, with the verb always singular). A pre-verbal subject triggers full agreement. The contrast is only visible with plural human subjects.
  • The two embedded clause types differ in three ways:
    • ʔan clauses: used with attitude predicates, verb comes first, subjunctive mood.
    • ʔanna clauses: used with factual cognition, perception and utterance predicates, subject comes first in the accusative, indicative mood.
  • Corpus evidence shows disjoint reference for all OC candidates except one disputed case. This includes modals and aspectuals, contradicting claimed links between semantic tense, agreement and control.
  • In the backward pattern, corpus searches never found material between the matrix predicate and ʔan. The authors treat this as evidence that the two verbs form one inseparable unit.
  • An attempt to reuse Wurmbrand & Haddad's (2016) movement analysis of backward raising was set aside because the matrix agreement differs between the two constructions. Control with matrix objects remains an open question, since objects trigger no agreement that could serve as evidence. The work was funded by the Israel Science Foundation (grant 505/11).

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Agreement on the embedded verb is used as observable evidence for whether two subjects corefer, so the analysis does not just assume control from the verb's lexical class.
  • I2. Lexical generalizations that are supposedly obligatory get tested by hunting for counterexamples in a large corpus, and even "safe" classes like modals failed the test.
  • I3. Some matrix verbs plus their complement are analysed as one complex predicate denoting a single event with a single argument structure. The diagnostic is that nothing can intervene between them.
  • I4. Where native-speaker intuitions are hard to get, corpus evidence is combined with near-native expert judgments, and each source compensates for the other's weaknesses.
  • I5. The authors state openly when the evidence cannot decide a question, as with object control where no agreement cue exists, instead of forcing an analysis.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): Treat the filler of an xcomp subject as a hypothesis backed by explicit cues (agreement, reflexives, context) rather than a fixed lexical rule. Allow a recorded override when the cues point to a different referent.
  • I2 (learn): Run each self-induced repair rule or lexical constraint against large silver data as a negative control. Demote any rule whose "always" claim has attested exceptions.
  • I3 (world): Merge restructuring-type verbs like "begin" or "try" with their complement into one event when they are strictly adjacent. This avoids splitting the world model into two loosely linked events.
  • I4 (learn): Let LLM teacher tiers act as "near-native judges" that check corpus-mined silver patterns, rather than serving as sole ground truth.
  • I5 (answer): When no cue settles a reference, keep the ambiguity explicit in the explanation trace and in the answer's confidence rather than picking silently.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of HaifaHaifa · Israel27 works · 871 citations🎓Open University of IsraelRaanana · Israel14 works · 2,016 citations

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksPsychology · 798 worksDevelopmental and Educational Psychology · 260 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Semitic languages · 1,484 works

Cite

Cite as Tali Arad Greshler, Nurit Melnik and Shuly Wintner. 2017. Seeking control in Modern Standard Arabic. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5334/gjgl.295

@article{greshler2017seeking,
  title = {{Seeking control in Modern Standard Arabic}},
  author = {Tali Arad Greshler, Nurit Melnik and Shuly Wintner},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2017},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.295},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.295}
}

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  42. How to cite this article: Arad Greshler, Tali, Nurit Melnik and Shuly Wintner. 2017. Seeking control in Modern Standard Arabic. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 2(1): 90. 1–41, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.295 ↗
  43. Submitted: 14 November 2016 find
  44. Published: 09 October 2017 find
  45. Copyright: © 2017 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity Press. OPEN ACCESS ↗

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