Control, temporal orientation, and the cross-linguistic grammar of <i>trying</i>

Abstract

The verb try plays a starring role in many example sentences in the control literature. But one of its most basic properties has eluded satisfying explanation: for many speakers of English, try rejects non-control infinitival complements, as in %I tried for John to notice me or %John tried for there to be food on the table. A number of scholars have hypothesized that this fact about try has a semantic basis, but this hypothesis has yet to be fully reconciled with the problem of crossdialectal and cross-linguistic variation and with existing formal semantic approaches to trysentences. In this paper, based in part on a novel observation from Spanish and Hebrew about how try's complement type interacts with its temporal orientation, I aim to further substantiate the semantic approach to try's behavior. The proposal is couched in an explicit compositional treatment of the formal semantics of try-sentences, whereby non-control try-sentences induce a presupposition failure which can be repaired in some languages via a coercion mechanism that is independently detectable in that in some languages it enables a future orientation for the complement. The implication is that cross-linguistic variation in the inventory of coercion mechanisms obscures an underlyingly principled semantic basis for try's behavior.

Montague Grammar Induction

“…subjectless infinitivals and bare infinitivals with and without subjects, which are tightly grouped in a separate cluster-may suggest that the model is formally representing some combination of having a overt subject (or perhaps a complementizer) and containing a modal-in this case, would or to (Bhatt 1999;Wurmbrand 2014: cf. Stowell 1982Ogihara 1996;Martin 2001;Katz 2001;Pearson 2016; and see also Grano 2012Grano , 2017Williamson 2019).…”

A “borderline case” of syntactic variation

“…I agree that the example is somehow acceptable, but this is obviously due to coercion: the correct paraphrase would be: Yesterday, I tried (to make arrangements) such that I don't have to meet him tomorrow. Grano (2017) discusses several cases of coercion in uncommon uses of try.…”

Montague Grammar Induction

“…subjectless infinitivals and bare infinitivals with and without subjects, which are tightly grouped in a separate cluster-may suggest that the model is formally representing some combination of having a overt subject (or perhaps a complementizer) and containing a modal-in this case, would or to (Bhatt 1999;Wurmbrand 2014: cf. Stowell 1982Ogihara 1996;Martin 2001;Katz 2001;Pearson 2016; and see also Grano 2012Grano , 2017Williamson 2019).…”