Subject To-Infinitives and Control

This paper stems from an effort to explain control in English from the semantic point of view. Following such semantic tradition of control as Pollard and Sag (1994), and Culicover and Jackendoff (2001, 2003, 2005), it puts in the center the semantic properties of control predicates when it comes to choice of controller in subject to-infinitive sentences. This paper also classifies control predicates which typically co-occur with subject to-infinitives and identifies a control structure for each category. Through this approach, this paper concludes: (1) local control is encoded in the argument structures of predicates; (2) LD-control is actually speaker (or thinker) or hearer control; (3) lastly, the so-called Intervention Effect with disturb type predicates can be accounted for by an interaction between the lexical structure and the topic position, and no such effect with help type predicates by a propositional peculiarity of the infinitive they take.