The English System of Degree of Control (Diver, 1984) is a Columbia School hypothesis that posits invariant meanings for word order signals in what are traditionally called transitive and ditransitive sentences. In this paper, the Control System is shown to account for speakers’ choices between two… read more
This paper offers an innovative Columbia School account of English -self pronouns (myself, yourself, etc.). The analysis rejects the view that the distribution of -self pronouns is a reflex of syntactic structure, as well as the traditional characterization of -self as a reflexive pronoun. Instead,… read more