Jussive Particles and Obligatory Control in Korean

A small number of studies on control have recently observed that in the embedded contexts, three sentence-final particles in Korean, such as the imperative -la, the promissive -ma and the exhorative -ca, contribute to the determination of the type of control: that is, -la yields object control, -ma subject control, and -ca split antecedent control. The major goal of this paper is to claim that building on the insight of Gamerschlag (2007) and Madigan (2008) (and Fujii (2006) for Japanese), the obligatory referential dependency between null subjects of embedded clauses headed by these three particles and (a) matrix argument(s) is an instance of OC (Obligatory Control), but unlike the aforementioned works, the null subjects of the three types of clauses, which Pak (2004, 2006) labels the jussive clauses, are pro. Under these claims, by adopting Pak et al. (2008a, b), this paper argues that the person feature of pro is valued by Agree with the head of the Jussive Phrase appearing in between CP and TP. Furthermore, it is suggested that the referent of the same null subject is naturally determined by the canonical function of each clause type (cf. Portner (2004, 2007)). Finally, to explain the cases where controllers are not actual speakers or addressees, this paper proposes that null pronouns and jussive particles may have shiftable person features when matrix verbs have [+performative, +communication] features.