Two takes on the de se

Relinquishing Control: What Romanian De Se Attitude Reports Teach Us About Immunity To Error Through Misidentification

“…She suggests that control is sometimes allowed, but never necessitated, by certain syntactic structures, but she understands obligatory control as reducing to binding theory, since PRO is not an element belonging to the grammar of Romanian subjunctives.12 This contradicts the claim inFolescu & Higginbotham (2012: 56). The data discussed there are inconclusive, as the examples discussed here indicate, especially the obvious syntactical uniformity of sentences (6) and (9), which is never mentioned inFolescu & Higginbotham (2012).…”

“…However, a more modest idea, that certain thoughts display IEM and that thoughts like those are systematically expressed in certain ways in different languages is worthy of further consideration. Folescu & Higginbotham (2012) investigated whether data from other languages, in particular Romanian, support a thesis like this. According to Folescu & Higginbotham (2012), in Romanian, PRO does not play the syntactical role it does in English; however, the data discussed suggests that Romanian may have obligatory control elements akin to PRO, which force a de se interpretation of the relevant reports, and thus support the idea that those reports have IEM.…”

“…Folescu & Higginbotham (2012) investigated whether data from other languages, in particular Romanian, support a thesis like this. According to Folescu & Higginbotham (2012), in Romanian, PRO does not play the syntactical role it does in English; however, the data discussed suggests that Romanian may have obligatory control elements akin to PRO, which force a de se interpretation of the relevant reports, and thus support the idea that those reports have IEM. The subjunctive mood of certain verbs was found to be (weakly) correlated with de se triggers and, thus, introduction of reports that have IEM.…”

“…The subjunctive mood of certain verbs was found to be (weakly) correlated with de se triggers and, thus, introduction of reports that have IEM. Folescu & Higginbotham (2012), however, didn't take into account the grammatical diversity of the reports that display IEM in Romanian: some of these reports are expressed by using de se triggers; others are not. Moreover, in this paper I will argue that in Romanian, there are reports that syntactically do not look as if they're expressing de se attitudes (since they do not use any de se triggers) that are, nonetheless, expressing thoughts with IEM.…”