The minimal distance principle and obligatory control in Persian

The goal of this paper is to investigate the syntax and semantics of obligatory control predicates in Persian. After reviewing present syntactic approaches to control, the facts of Persian are shown to lead to the conclusion that it is not possible to identify the controller in Persian on purely syntactic grounds. Rather, the properties of obligatory control constructions in this language provide evidence for the necessity of considering semantic factors in the proper analysis of this construction. These properties are shown to follow a semantic treatment along the lines of Jackendoff and Culicover, 2003 and Culicover and Jackendoff, 2005. We propose that in Persian obligatory control constructions, the control predicate licenses an event complement with the controller being the argument to which the control predicate assigns the role of actor for the action stated in the complement clause. Classes of exceptions, not to be discussed in this paper, may be 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.