Variation in control in Russian infinitive change-of-posture constructions

In this paper, I investigate the variation in control attested in Russian infinitive constructions with verbs denoting change-of-posture causation. The analysis of corpus data shows that the choice between subject control (povesil sušit’) and object control (povesil sušit’sja) correlates in terms of frequency with linear position of the object (povesil sušit’ bel’jo vs. povesil bel’jo sušit’sja) and with the meaning of the infinitive construction (postavil žarit’ vs. postavil tušit’sja). The general conclusion is that the choice of subject control correlates with the features indicating a higher degree of semantic and/or syntactic coherence between the matrix verb and the infinitive, while the choice of subject control correlates with the features indicating a lower degree of coherence.