A COGNITIVE APPROACH TO OBLIGATORY CONTROL PHENOMENA IN ENGLISH AND GERMAN

The aim of the pa.per is to develop a uniform semantic-pragmatic theory of controller choice for a number of German and English subject control verbs like promise/versprechen and object control verbs like request/bitten, recommend/empfehlen, force / zwingen, etc., which prototypically require a complement clause denoting an action performed by a human agent, who is left unexpressed in the infinitive clause (PRO). We propose the concept of 'semantic-pragmatic role ' to account for a number of control phenomena which have hitherto been treated as exceptions. We show that con-troller choice and control switch heavUy depend on two semantic-pragmatic factors, i.e. 'degree of agentivity of PRO ' and 'role iden-tity of a matrix NP and PRO'. Furthermore, at least in English, 'iconicity', i.e. the reflection of referential identity in formal close-ness, plays an important role. Our analysis is based on two experi-ments conducted with 35 native speakers of German and 28 native speakers of American English. 1