PIMPing up implicit control
Iva Kovač
November 2022 

This paper presents a new generalisation about implicit control in the context of passives (building on Pitteroff & Schäfer 2019): iff a type of passive can be construed as impersonal passive with unergative verbs, then it also allows implicit control. Passives are thus split into two types: those that allow impersonal construals and implicit control and those that do not. The revision of Pitteroff & Schäfer’s original generalisation is motivated by the distribution of implicit control in languages such as Croatian, which have more than one passive, and by novel data showing a contrast between different types of passive with respect to the availability of wh-extraction in implicit control configurations. I propose that an important role in deriving the two-way split (between types of passive that do and those that do not allow impersonal construals and implicit control) is played by the featural makeup of the passive implicit argument (PIMP), which may vary both among and within languages. I propose that the featural composition of PIMP has consequences for its ability to enter an agreement dependency with T, which in turn enables PIMP to control PRO, indicating that agreement is a crucial component of (at least implicit) control.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/007085 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	To appear in: Proceedings of WCCFL 40
keywords:	implicit control, impersonal construals, passive, implicit arguments, agreement, interaction/satisfaction, complementation, clausal associates, wh-extraction, syntax
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