This paper showed that many of the facts about "control" in the NP+V+NP+INF construction are predictable from the constructional semantics if we assume this pattern belongs to the "ditransitive construction." In the ditransitive construction its subject is characterized as the intentional initiator of the designated transfer event, and its object as a beneficiary. The paper showed that the referent of the unrealized subject of INF is to be determined in such a way that these two constructional requirements do not contract one another, and that many control-related facts can be adequately captured by this framework.

The goal of this paper is to show that the cognitivist approach to categorization and construction can adequately capture the mechanism of “control” and various related problems. It will be shown that the properties of control follow from the semantics of the constructional schemas evoked for the categorization. Also, we claim that our schema-based approach can provide a natural account of certain long-standing problems, such as the paucity of subject control verbs, the split acceptability status of subject control sentences, shifts in the choice of controller, and the difference in the acceptability of detransitivization between subject and object control verbs. © 2001, The English Linguistic Society of Japan. All rights reserved.

HAVE constructions allow for object NPs whose modifiers allow one to infer that the referent of the NP cannot stand in a possessive relationship with the referent of the subject, as in I have a missing tooth. Although it is generally held that the inalienability of the object NP plays a crucial role in this phenomenon, there exist examples which do not seem to be cases of inalienable possession. Taking recent psychological research into consideration, we argue that the interpretation in question arises as a consequence of the mechanism that underlies our subjective construal of the world, and show that apparently problematic data are given a cognitively motivated explanation.∗. © 1999, The English Linguistic Society of Japan. All rights reserved.