Control Types or Complement Types? On the Licensing of Overt Controlees in Mandarin Chinese

Aligning with other languages, Mandarin Chinese allows overt controlees in control constructions. A debate on the status and licensing of overt controlees has arisen recently. D. Li (2024) argues that the distinction between exhaustive control and partial control is closely related to the occurrence of overt controlees, whereas only partial control verbs allow overt controlees. On the contrary, following the Implicational Complementation Hierarchy (ICH) framework, He (2024) proposes that only Situation complements allow overt controlees. In this study, we argue against D. Li’s (2024) conclusions and provide counterexamples to her findings. We find that some exhaustive control verbs allow overt controlees as well, and in Mandarin Chinese an utterance with a control verb is not always an obligatory control construction. Therefore, our new observation supports He’s (2024) proposal, and we further argue that ICH is a better way to describe the distribution of overt controlees in Mandarin Chinese, and coercion makes it possible for a sentence with a control verb to change into a non-control construction.