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Exhaustive control as movement: The case of Wolof

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Abstract

This paper investigates control constructions in the Niger-Congo language Wolof, which offers several insights into the phenomenon of control. First, I show that one and the same predicate can take infinitival complements of different sizes, giving additional suport to the claims in Wurmbrand (2014c, 2015), Wurmbrand and Lohninger (2023). Next, I present arguments in favor of Grano’s (2012, 2015) claim that Exhaustive Control (EC) and Partial Control (PC) are derived via different strategies, specifically, that EC is the result of movement (Hornstein 1999 et seq.). Control in Wolof is only exhaustive, both with cross-linguistically typical EC predicates and with typical PC predicates, and, notably, all control constructions in Wolof restructure, and all control verbs are monotransitive, properties that usually characterize EC, but not PC predicates. This confirms a correlation between EC, restructuring, and monotransitivity argued for by Cinque (2004, 2006) and Grano (2012, 2015). While Cinque’s and Grano’s approaches treat EC predicates as functional verbs, I argue that this bundle of properties cannot be a simple consequence of monoclausal syntax and propose that movement of the subject from the infinitival into the matrix clause must be available in bi-clausal constructions as well, supporting the view that at least one type of control is derived via movement, and does not involve PRO. An additional argument for this claim comes from ditransitive verbs: I show that Wolof does not have object control, and attribute this property to the larger size of infinitival complements in ditransitive constructions, resulting in the subject movement into the higher clause being impeded.

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Notes

  1. Unless otherwise noted, all Wolof data were collected by the author during primary fieldwork in Saint-Louis and Ndombo Alarba, Senegal, through direct elicitation. All sentences were elicited so that speakers would be given a context, and then either asked how the target sentence would be said in Wolof (the contact language is French), or they would be given a sentence in Wolof and asked if it is appropriate in the provided context. The bulk of the data on control come from three 6-week long trips, in 2018, 2019, and 2022; some data on ditransitive predicates were collected during a 5-week trip in 2023. All of the data were initially collected from five speakers; over the four field trips, the data were additionally checked with another seven speakers. Any disagreement in judgments are noted for relevant examples.

  2. For accounts of default temporal interpretation of tenseless clauses in Wolof, see Bochnak and Martinović (2019), who base their analysis on Smith and Erbaugh (2005), Smith et al. (2007), Mucha (2013).

  3. Which meaning is available depends on the structural height of di; see Bochnak and Martinović 2018 for details.

  4. Only one speaker suggested a meaning difference associated with the presence of doon, as in (i), but no other speaker shared this intuition.

    1. (i)
      figure w

  5. Wurmbrand (2001, 2002, 2004) notes that German appears to provide one counterexample to this otherwise cross-linguistically very robust generalization: the verb gelingen ‘manage’ allows for long passive, taken to be evidence for the highest degree of restructuring, yet the controller is its dative argument.

  6. A reviewer notes that clitic climbing is blocked from complements which contain the preposition ci (the reviewer refers to it as a complementizer):

    1. (i)
      figure ah

    These do not appear to be clausal complements, but simple PP complements. This can be seen when they contain an overt subject, which can only be a possessor inside a possessive DP:

    1. (ii)
      figure ai

    I therefore take ci-complements to not be clausal complements, and to not involve control. The example in (i) would then be at most a nominalized VP (there are no overt nominalizers in Wolof).

  7. One group of most commonly restructuring verbs, movement verbs, does not allow clitic climbing in Wolof. Clitics only move to follow the embedded verb, as in (i).

    1. (i)
      figure ak

    The infinitival complement of movement verbs appears to be an adjunct (a purpose clause with the meaning ‘in order to...’); for example, the complementizer ngir ‘because,’ ‘in order to’ can optionally be added to the infinitive. I leave these predicates aside here, and hypothesize that clitic climbing is blocked from adjuncts.

  8. This can be captured by proposing that the clitic probes downward (Chomsky 2000, 2001; Preminger 2013), contra recent literature proposing that Agree is the result of a structurally lower Probe probing up (e.g. Zeijlstra 2012; Bjorkman and Zeijlstra 2019).

  9. I consider the C hosting sentence particles the final head in the extended projection of the verb. Wolof has a rich left periphery and a higher, embedding complementizer, which would constitute a separate domain.

  10. I represent the movement to the higher edge as happening in one fell swoop for simplicity; I do not exclude the possibility that it occurs in a cyclic fashion reminiscent of A′-movement (another kind of movement to the edge).

  11. The verb ‘want, intend’ has mixed properties, in that it is a PC verb, but also typically restructures. This will not be relevant here; see Grano (2012, 2015) for a possible analysis.

  12. Verbs of saying take only finite complements, and emotive verbs take PP complements.

  13. The clause-type in (62a), with the complementizer na, allows only pronominal clause-internal subjects; non-pronominal subjects can only occur in the left periphery. For extensive arguments that the subject clitic in these clauses is a pronoun, and not agreement, see Martinović (2015, 2023a).

  14. Copular clauses in Wolof are A′-movement structures, with the predicate in Spec,CP, and the subject topicalized and resumed (Martinović 2023b).

  15. Some speakers accept some of these examples, however, they interpret it as a matrix question, such as ‘What did you do to convince your friend to buy it?’ or ‘How did you help your mothere to cook it?’. The preference is to change the question word from lan ‘what’ to nan ‘how,’ in which case it becomes grammatical for all speakers.

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Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I wish to thank my Wolof consultants without whom this work would not be possible, especially Mbaye Diop, Demba Lô, Lamine N’Diaye, Maggatte N’Diaye, Louis Camara, Ahmet Fall, and many others who chose to stay anonymous. Thanks are due to the audiences at the 2020 Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto-Hamilton Syntax Workshop, where a part of this research was presented as a plenary talk, and at the University of Chicago Morphology and Syntax Workshop. I also thank Karlos Arregi, Tom Grano, and Eric Potsdam for feedback on various parts of this research, and Vera Gribanova and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments which greatly improved the paper. All errors are my own.

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  1. Department of Linguistics, McGill University, 1085 Dr. Penfield, Montreal, H3A 1A7, QC, Canada

    Martina Martinović

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Martinović, M. Exhaustive control as movement: The case of Wolof. Nat Lang Linguist Theory (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-023-09605-1

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