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 θ $ \theta $ 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 ϕ $ \unicode{x03D5} $ phi -features on T – the same projection hosting verbal inflection.