ON SO-CALLED‘OBLIGATORY CONTROL’

A COGNITIVE ACCOUNT

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to show that the cognitivist approach to categorization and construction can adequately capture the mechanism of “control”and various related problems. It will be shown that the properties of control follow from the semantics of the constructional schemas evoked for the categorization. Also, we claim that our schema-based approach can provide a natural account of certain long-standing problems, such as the paucity of subject control verbs, the split acceptability status of subject control sentences, shifts in the choice of controller, and the difference in the acceptability of detransitivization between subject and object control verbs.