Partial control in Romance languages: The covert comitative analysis

This article considers the availability of partial Control in European Portuguese, French, Spanish and Italian and argues that many apparent examples of partial Control actually involve exhaustive control with a covert comitative, along the lines proposed by Boeckx, Hornstein & Nunes (2010) for English. The low level differences between French, Spanish, Italian and European Portuguese are argued to reduce to lexical differences concerning which verbs happen to be comitative in these varieties. This is the case even though the covert comitative approach is actually problematic as an analysis of partial Control in English. The implication for theories of Control is that surface instances of partial Control can have different underlying analyses.