Landau I. A selectional theory of adjunct control

Cambridge : The MIT Press, 2021. — 264 p.Theories of control have been continually challenged by the vexed relationship between complement control and adjunct control. Strategic responses widely differ, from full assimilation of the two types to total separation. These responses reflect different empirical descriptions. On certain theories, adjuncts display obligatory control (OC) just like complements (Williams 1980, Mohanan 1983, Clark 1990, Hornstein 1999, 2003, Pires 2007, Witkoś and Żychliński 2014, McFadden and Sundaresan 2018), drawing on a single underlying grammatical mechanism: functional control, predication, movement, or Agree. At the other extreme there are theories explicitly restricted to complement control, positing mechanisms that cannot extend to adjuncts (Chierchia 1984, Landau 2000, Jackendoff and Culicover 2003) and thus leaving the relationship between the two types unclear. Finally, some theories acknowledge that adjunct control may display either OC or nonobligatory control (NOC), yet attempt to unify NOC with OC in complement control at the theoretical level (Williams 1992, Español-Echevarría 2000, Landau 2013, 2015, 2017, Green 2018, 2019). The present study is a further step in the latter direction.