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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/19898
Description
Title
A pragmatic account of control
Author(s)
Williams, Timothy Kevin
Issue Date
1995
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Green, Georgia M.
Department of Study
Linguistics
Discipline
Linguistics
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Language, Linguistics
Language
eng
Abstract
The interpretation of control sentences can best be explained pragmatically, i.e., in terms of the beliefs and assumptions which the listener makes about what the speaker intended by the utterance. A listener identifies an entity as the referent of the unexpressed subject of infinitival and gerund complements by drawing inferences based on the partial semantic information contained in such sentences.
The objectives of this thesis are to articulate a clear and precise theory of the interpretation of both non-obligatory and obligatory control sentences, to show that a pragmatic theory makes it possible to predict the choice of controller on the basis of interpretive strategy without stipulating the control behavior of different classes of verbs, and to compare this theory with previous syntactic and semantic theories. The syntactic/semantic framework assumed is the HPSG framework of Pollard and Sag (1994).
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