Some notes on falloir, devoir, and the theory of control
This article sheds new light on the structure and meaning of sentences containing the French modal verbs devoir and falloir, as well as on the syntax and semantics of Control generally. Well-known and previously unnoticed empirical facts are examined that support the author’s novel contention that falloir and devoir are syntactically and semantically ambiguous. These data are also argued to offer indirect support for the analysis of Control clauses recently developed in Reed (2014: Ch. 6 and 7), according to which there is a theoretical primitive (pro) and it is associated with a “minimal” feature bundle consisting of just [−expletive] and [+N] syntactic features, with a separate, post-syntactic Theory of Control determining its understood phi-features.
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Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
Reed, Lisa A.
2019.
Further Implications of French Devoir and Falloir for Theories of Control and Modality. In
Contributions of Romance Languages to Current Linguistic Theory [
Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 95],
► pp. 65 ff.
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