Distribution of PRO in Persian OC Constructions

Deriving the distribution of PRO and Obligatory Control (OC) in finite contexts has been a topic of considerable debate. Evidence coming from different languages shows that there is OC in finite contexts, then the theories of “Government and Binding “(GB) and “Minimalist Program”, which analyze control structures based on nonfiniteness of the complement, need to be refined. Landau (1999, 2000, 2004, 2006) proposes an alternative approach in which the distribution of PRO is more directly linked to tense/agreement properties of infl. He claims to get a generalization to account for the distribution of PRO in finite and nonfinite contexts in all languages. However, this article shows that while Landau’s model is effective for justifying exhaustive and non-obligatory or non-control constructions in Persian, it has some deficiencies in accounting for non-exhaustive control in Persian. Then it is proposed that building upon Jackendoff and Culicover’s (2003) semantic analysis of control, we can solve inadequacies of purely syntactic analysis in justifying the distribution of PRO and overt DPs in the subject position of the embedded clause in Persian control structures. Therefore, in this article, the importance of semantic factors to solve this problem is proved.