Investigating Control in English and Arabic*

Abstract

This paper attempts to account for the syntactic phenomenon of control that obtains between the empty subject position of nonfinite subordinate clauses and an antecedent in the matrix clause. Both Arabic and English display such constructions. The paper discusses the standard mechanism proposed to account for control - i.e. positing the null element PRO in the empty position , which is bound to an antecedent via standard binding principles . This widely accepted analysis for English cannot be maintained for Arabic control constructions. It is argued that the pronominal pro is a more adequate candidate to fill the empty positioning this language if we take the phenomenon of control to belong to the semantics of the individual control predicates rather than a binding relation that should be accounted or on purely syntactic grounds..