Reference patterns in subjunctive complement clauses of Modern Standard Arabic

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the status of control constructions in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). MSA has several embedded clause constructions, some of which resemble control in English (and other languages). However, these constructions exhibit some notable differences. Chief among them is the fact that the embedded verb carries agreement features that can indicate both coreference and disjoint reference between a matrix argument and the understood subject of the complement clause. We conducted a thorough corpus-based investigation of such constructions, with a special focus on a search for obligatory control in the language. We show that our findings contradict accepted generalizations (and predictions) proposed by state-of-the-art theories of control, as they indicate that there are no "real" control predicates in MSA. We outline an HPSG analysis that accounts for the MSA data.