What categorial ambiguity doesn't tell us about crossed control: Commentary on Jeoung 2020

Abstract

Jeoung (2020) argues that certain predicates in Indonesian are categorially ambiguous between auxiliaries and lexical verbs. Moreover, she claims that the auxiliary reading has been overlooked in analyses of so-called crossed control in Indonesian. As we show in this reply, however, the auxiliary reading is in fact independent of crossed control.

Noncanonical Obligatory Control

“…In support of their raising analysis, Polinsky and Potsdam claimed that Indonesian CC verbs cannot be passivised, just as Raising verbs; the same observation has been made for Sundanese (Kurniawan, 2013) and Balinese (Natarina, 2018). Paul and Vander Klok (2021) and Paul et al. (2021), however, argue that appearances are misleading, and that some CC verbs can occur with passive voice morphology, as in (49c); the reason many CC verbs cannot is due to their morphological deficiency 21…”

“…However, Jeoung's proposal has been critiqued as insufficient: Even if some CC constructions with some verbs are illusory and really reduce to Raising past auxiliaries, not all of them can be so analysed (Nomoto, 2021; Paul & Vander Klok, 2021). Paul and Vander Klok report that most of their Indonesian informants reject the auxiliary (modal) sense of coba ‘try’ in CC.…”