12 May 2008

don't mention this one

a strange coincidence of events just occurred.  i was walking home from campus, where i had been working on a paper on some bizarre control phenomena, when "Pipe Dream" by the now-sadly-defunct Trendy came up on my ipod.  the first sentence of the song is:

would it be all right / if i asked a deaf guy / to borrow his headphones?
yeah, that's PRO, in a clause introduced by ask that also contains an object, being subject-controlled.  i've got enough to talk about in my paper (analyzing sentences of the type "John said PRO to leave"), so this oddball case is going to get conveniently ignored for the time being.