Control of clitics in Greek tough-constructions

Abstract

Greek na-clauses are central to the debate on syntactic control, as they have been claimed to involve obligatory control (when selected by a control predicate) despite inflection on the verb. In this paper, we argue that Greek na-clauses also challenge the common assumption that control can only target the subject (rather than other arguments) of the embedded clause, on the basis of tough-constructions, where a non-subject clitic resumes the matrix subject. We show that genuine tough-constructions are best analysed as obligatory control due to both syntactic (mandatory coreference of the clitic, locality of the dependency, presence of the clitic with focus/quantifiers, lack of real reconstruction) and semantic (sensitivity to the features and theta-role of the DP) constraints. We argue that an Agree-based theory of control (Landau 2015) can capture tough-constructions and other cases of control of clitics in Greek by treating the clitic as a minimal pronoun with unvalued phi-features on T - the same projection hosting verbal inflection.