On Visser's Generalization

The article addresses the issue of Visser's Generalization (VG), holding that Subject Control verbs are incompatible with the passive, and proposes a solution based on a combination of the passive seen as smuggling and Obligatory Control seen as A-movement (Hornstein 2001, Hornstein & Polinsky 2010). The smuggling-type passive is perfectly compatible with the behavior of Object Control verbs, while also showing that in the case of passivized Subject Control constructions the crucial c-command link between the controller and PRO is not preserved, thus inducing the VG effect. This solution leads to three expectations confirmed in the literature: (a) lack of object promotion, meaning no smuggling of the infinitive and PRO out of the c-command domain of the implicit Agent, does not disturb Subject Control (van Urk 2011); (b) PRO requires c-command by its controller at LF, which holds true once the apparently problematic cases of intraposition and extraposition in Super Equi and the concept of logophoric extension from (Landau 2001, 2010) are reconsidered; (c) the smuggled constituent including the infinitive does not reconstruct to its original position. Alternative proposals are also considered to show the empirical adequacy of the presented solution

Epistemology · Generalization · Infinitive · Linguistics · Programming language · Verb · World Wide Web · Computer Science · Logic, Reasoning, and Knowledge · Philosophy · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation · Artificial Intelligence

• Experimental evidence of variation and gradience in the syntax and semantics of transitive subject control

  Open Access•Meghan Isabel Jeffrey, Chung-Hye Han et al.•Lingua•2015

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