The anaphoric semantics of partial control

PC has received considerable interest, at first from a syntactic perspective (cf. in particular the work of Landau), more recently also in semantics [2, 7, 9]. PC touches on important theoretical questions such as how the controller-controllee relation is established and what the denotation of a control complement is. Morever it raises new questions such as why there is no ‘superset control’ (controller ⊃ PRO) or why there is no partial raising [7]. The semantic analyses in [2, 7, 9] all make PC unexceptional and directly allowed by the semantics e.g. by having the control verb introduce an embedded subject which is existentially quantified and relates to the controller via a subset relation rather than equality [7]. Such approaches are at odds with the oftmade observation that PC is a marked, sometimes marginal option that requires contextual support. This paper offers a new analysis that accounts for this observation by assimilating PC to bridging in anaphoric resolution. The approach is formalized in an extended version of partial, compositional DRT (PCDRT) [3]. Context-dependency of PC PC requires a contextually salient plurality, such as the one primed by chair in (1), to be felicitous. For example, the second sentence of (2) can only mean ‘He wants to have lunch with me’, as the context does not provide other suitable ways of constructing the plural antecedent for PRO that the complement requires.