Wilkinson (1971) and Lawler (1972) originally observed the phenomenon of partial control (PC). Descriptively, PC refers to situations in which the reference of PRO must include that of an overt argument in the matrix clause, but is not exhaustively determined by that argument. The effects of PC are best observed in sentences like (1a), which contain an infinitival whose predicate is unambiguously collective (i.e., one that requires, rather than just allows, its subject to denote a plural entity; cf. (1b)).
Most of the research on PC has focused on the (semantic) properties of those matrix predicates that license the phenomenon (see, e.g., Landau 2000, White and Grano 2013 for a survey and experimental data, as well as Pearson 2016). One notable exception to this trend is provided by Sheehan (2012, 2014), who observes that PC in European Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, and...