On the English Subject Control

This paper examines the English subject control which is involved in the to-infinitive complement taken by verbs like promise with an object, as in Meg promised Ben to leave. The implicit subject of this complement is controlled by the subject rather than the object of the main clause. This reveals the lacks of syntactic immediacy, in contrast to the object control counterpart such as Meg persuaded Ben to leave. It is argued that the intervening object in the subject control construction is not the direct object that forms a core array of semantic arguments with a subject. The object is rather the indirect object that functions as a semantic modifier. For this, the paper show evidence from the parallel cases of make and proposes an analysis of subject control as agent control in conceptual structure. In this structure, the indirect object in question is analysed as a semantic modifier. The paper also addresses the theoretical benefits and remaining issues the proposed analysis might have.