The Curious Case of Control

Abstract

Children acquiring English make systematic errors on subject control sentences (Chomsky, 1969) possibly due to heuristics based on semantic roles (Maratsos, 1974).Given the advanced fluency of large generative language models, we ask what kinds of generalizations these models make on object and subject control clauses.We find broad differences between models, with many models adopting positional heuristics that succeed on subject control but fail on object control.This result is surprising, given that object control is orders of magnitude more frequent in text data.

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