Adjunct Control in Telugu: Exceptions as Non-Exceptions

Abstract

South Asian languages license control into adjuncts known as conjunctive participle clauses. At thesame time, these languages allow exceptions to adjunct control. These exceptions have received veryfew, mainly semantic, analyses in the literature. This paper focuses on one South Asian language,Telugu, and offers a syntactic analysis. It shows that the so-called exceptions to adjunct controlare non-exceptions and that they are instances of Expletive Control that involve two unaccusativepredicates. The proposal is not without challenges. One challenge comes from English that does notallow Expletive Control. The article spells out the English details and shows that they do not createa problem for the Telugu data.