On subject reference and the cartography of clause types
In this commentary, Iwill critically discuss Priyanka Biswas contribution to this volume (2013), in which she examines the properties of five types of clauses headed by participial verb forms in Bangla and proposes an account of their sometimes novel properties in terms of Landau (2004)s theory of control. Iwill take Biswas empirical analysis as a starting point for a broader discussion of finiteness and the relationship between different types of embedded clauses and the kinds of subjects they allow. Iwill argue that the theoretical treatment Biswas herself adopts does not allow a proper explanation of the connection, and will propose a distinct approach in terms of differential clause sizes. While this approach will remain highly speculative, Iwill argue that it at least allows us to formulate falsifiable hypotheses with testable predictions, and thus could serve as the foundation for a truly insightful theory of the distribution of subject types.
subjects cartography bangla control finiteness embedding case clause-size