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Deriving the distribution of PRO and Obligatory Control (OC) in finite contexts has been a topic of considerable debate. Evidence coming from different languages shows that there is OC in finite contexts, then the theories of “Government and Binding “(GB) and “Minimalist Program”, which analyze control structures based on nonfiniteness of the complement, need to be refined. Landau (1999, 2000, 2004, 2006) proposes an alternative approach in which the distribution of PRO is more directly linked to tense/agreement properties of infl. He claims to get a generalization to account for the distribution of PRO in finite and nonfinite contexts in all languages. However, this article shows that while Landau’s model is effective for justifying exhaustive and non-obligatory or non-control constructions in Persian, it has some deficiencies in accounting for non-exhaustive control in Persian. Then it is proposed that building upon Jackendoff and Culicover’s (2003) semantic analysis of control, we can solve inadequacies of purely syntactic analysis in justifying the distribution of PRO and overt DPs in the subject position of the embedded clause in Persian control structures. Therefore, in this article, the importance of semantic factors to solve this problem is proved.

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This paper investigates different kinds of control predicates in Persian subjunctive complements. First, it is shown that the obligatory control (OC) constructions syntactically consist of two subtypes exhaustive control (EC) and non-exhaustive control (NEC). Then building upon Jackendoff and Culicover (2003) and Culicover and Jackendoff’s (2005) semantic analysis of control which is devoted to the treatment of infinitival and gerundive complements, we show that in a very large class of cases of OC in Persian , the controlled subjunctive complement also denotes an action. Providing a descriptive typology of each verb class, this analysis justifies the syntactic classification of control predicates  proposed in this paper. Classes of exceptions are treated as coercion in the sense of Sag and Pollard (1991), Pollard and Sag (1994), followed by Jackendoff and Culicover (2003) and Culicover and Jackendoff (2005), in which internal conventionalized semantic materials, not present in syntax, are added. The article shows that both semantic and syntactic properties of control predicates determine the type of control relation in Persian subjunctive complement clauses.