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The theory and syntactic representation of control structures: An analysis from Amharic

Summary

The paper describes how control constructions (clauses like "wished to win") are built in Amharic and uses them to test competing theories of control. Drawing on native-speaker judgements and minimal pairs of grammatical and starred sentences, the authors characterize Amharic control clauses. Such a clause is introduced by the clause marker lɨ-, always has an imperfective verb, and carries full phi-agreement that matches the matrix subject. Its silent subject is PRO, and it permits only exhaustive subject control. These properties cause trouble for Landau's view that tense and agreement features predict whether control is possible. The authors argue that the data are better explained by Wurmbrand's future infinitives combined with prospective aspect (Kratzer, Matthewson), with lɨ- acting as a posterior modal. Because Amharic hyper-raising lacks A-movement, the PRO analysis is preferred over the Movement Theory of Control (MTC). The study matters as evidence from an understudied SOV, pro-drop Semitic language bearing on how control structures are represented across languages.

Key points

  • Amharic has two morphological aspects. Perfective verbs take phi-features only as suffixes, while imperfective verbs take them both as prefixes and suffixes.
  • The use of tense auxiliaries differs by clause type:
    • In root clauses, perfectives forbid a tense auxiliary and imperfectives require one.
    • In embedded clauses, the auxiliary is banned whatever the aspect, which suggests the embedded structure is impoverished.
  • Embedded clause type is signalled by clause markers:
    • ʔɨndä- marks declaratives and polar questions.
    • kä- marks conditionals.
    • lɨ- marks control clauses.
    • mä- marks nominal (nominalized) clauses.
  • Control predicates fall into three classes: desiderative, modal, and try (conative). All of them are compatible with irrealis meaning.
  • mä- and lɨ- clauses differ in which predicates can take them:
    • Aspectual verbs ("begin", "stop"), factive verbs ("remember", "regret") and proposition-taking verbs accept mä- clauses but reject lɨ- clauses.
    • Following Stolen (2013), mä- expresses strong obligation ("obligated to sing"), while lɨ- expresses a weaker prospective reading ("should sing").

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The authors fix what an aspect means by testing which time adverbs it accepts ("yesterday", "now", "tomorrow"). For example, perfectives reject "tomorrow", and past imperfectives accept only past adverbs.
  • I2. The matrix verb's class decides what kind of complement it takes. Desiderative, modal and try verbs take a prospective, irrealis clause, whereas factive verbs take a clause whose event is presupposed to be real.
  • I3. The unexpressed subject of a control clause is a PRO bound by the whole matrix subject (exhaustive control only), not by a group that merely includes it.
  • I4. Two complement types that look alike are told apart by the modal strength they carry: one signals strong obligation, the other a weaker "should".
  • I5. The whole argument rests on minimal pairs of acceptable and starred sentences, each differing in a single marker.

For Mova

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

  • I1 (world): Adverb-compatibility tables could act as hard constraints when placing events on the text's timeline, and could flag readings that are temporally contradictory.
  • I2 (world): Complements of "wish/want/try" should be stored as unrealized possibilities, while complements of "remember/regret" are asserted as facts, so the world model does not wrongly record "Zinaye won".
  • I3 (frames): When filling agent roles for UD xcomp complements, Mova could copy exactly the matrix subject's referent as the agent of the embedded frame. Partial-control readings would then be treated as a separate, explicitly marked case.
  • I4 (frames): Speech-act and modality analysis could keep a graded obligation scale rather than a binary "modal" flag. This would help answer questions about whether someone was required or only advised to act.
  • I5 (learn): Starred variants could be generated automatically by swapping one function word or complementizer (e.g., "to" vs "-ing" after "stop/remember") to serve as negative controls in parser and frame evaluation.

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

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Topics Semitic languages

 Institutions

🎓United Arab Emirates UniversityAl Ain · United Arab Emirates2 works · 13 citations

Cite

Cite as Tommi Leung and Girma Halefom. 2017. The theory and syntactic representation of control structures: An analysis from Amharic. 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.277

@article{leung2017theory,
  title = {{The theory and syntactic representation of control structures: An analysis from Amharic}},
  author = {Tommi Leung and Girma Halefom},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2017},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.277},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.277}
}

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  57. How to cite this article: Leung, Tommi and Girma Halefom. 2017. The theory and syntactic representation of control structures: An analysis from Amharic. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 2(1): 97. 1–33, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.277 ↗ our card
  58. Submitted: 05 October 2016 find
  59. Published: 10 November 2017 find
  60. 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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