(Non)Attitude verbs and control shift: Evidence from German

Abstract

Recent work on obligatory control (OC) phenomena (following, in particular, Landau 2015) holds that certain non-canonical OC construals such as partial control, implicit control or control shift are generally possible with matrix attitude verbs but not with nonattitude verbs. The crosslinguistic validity of this empirical generalization however is subject to on- going research. With regard to German, it has been disputed for the case of implicit control (Pitteroff and Schäfer, 2019), but supported for partial control (Pitteroff et al., 2017). The study reported in this paper contributes experimental evidence for an attitude/nonattitude contrast in the availability of control shift in German. The results also indicate that the relevant difference concerns the interpretation rather than the acceptability of the triggering construction, thus adding some nuance to the empirical picture on control shift.