A Typology of Control in Persian Language

This paper investigates different kinds of control predicates in Persian subjunctive complements. First، it is shown that the obligatory control (OC) constructions syntactically consist of two subtypes exhaustive control (EC) and non-exhaustive control (NEC). Then building upon Jackendoff and Culicover (2003) and Culicover and Jackendoff’s (2005) semantic analysis of control which is devoted to the treatment of infinitival and gerundive complements، we show that in a very large class of cases of OC in Persian، the controlled subjunctive complement also denotes an action. Providing a descriptive typology of each verb class، this analysis justifies the syntactic classification of control predicates proposed in this paper. Classes of exceptions are treated as coercion in the sense of Sag and Pollard (1991)، Pollard and Sag (1994)، followed by Jackendoff and Culicover (2003) and Culicover and Jackendoff (2005)، in which internal conventionalized semantic materials، not present in syntax، are added. The article shows that both semantic and syntactic properties of control predicates determine the type of control relation in Persian subjunctive complement clauses.