Control as Movement

by Cedric Boeckx , Norbert Hornstein , Jairo Nunes

• ISBN13: 9780521195454
• ISBN10: 0521195454
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-10-11
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The Movement Theory of Control (MTC) makes one major claim: that control relations in sentences like 'John wants to leave' are grammatically mediated by movement. This goes against the traditional view that such sentences involve not movement, but binding, and analogizes control to raising, albeit with one important distinction: whereas the target of movement in control structures is a theta position, in raising it is a non-theta position; however the grammatical procedures underlying the two constructions are the same. This book presents the main arguments for MTC and shows it to have many theoretical advantages, the biggest being that it reduces the kinds of grammatical operations that the grammar allows, an important advantage in a minimalist setting. It also addresses the main arguments against MTC, using examples from control shift, adjunct control, and the control structure of 'promise', showing MTC to be conceptually, theoretically, and empirically superior to other approaches.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. x
Introduction	p. 1
Some historical background	p. 5
Introduction	p. 5
What any theory of control should account for	p. 5
Control in the standard-theory framework	p. 6
Control in GB	p. 9
Non-movement approaches to control within minimalism	p. 16
The null-case approach	p. 16
The Agree approach	p. 20
Conclusion	p. 35
Basic properties of the movement theory of control	p. 36
Introduction	p. 36
Departing from the null hypothesis: historical, architectural, and empirical reasons	p. 37
Back to the future: elimination of DS and the revival of the null hypothesis	p. 43
Controlled PROs as A-movement traces	p. 46
Configurational properties	p. 47
Interpretive properties	p. 49
Phonetic properties and grammatical status	p. 52
Conclusion	p. 56
Empirical advantages	p. 59
Introduction	p. 59
Morphological invisibility	p. 59
Interclausal agreement	p. 60
Finite control	p. 63
Finite control and hyper-raising	p. 70
Finite control, islands, and intervention effects	p. 75
Summary	p. 79
The movement theory of control under the copy theory of movement	p. 79
Adjunct control and sideward movement	p. 83
The movement theory of control and morphological restrictions on copies	p. 98
Backward control	p. 102
Phonetic realization of multiple copies and copy control	p. 115
Conclusion	p. 123
Empirical challenges and solutions	p. 125
Introduction	p. 125
Passives, obligatory control, and Visser's generalization	p. 125
Relativizing A-movement	p. 127
Impersonal passives	p. 132
Finite control vs. hyper-raising	p. 136
Nominals and control	p. 141
Finite control into noun-complement clauses in Brazilian Portuguese	p. 142
Raising into nominals in Hebrew	p. 147
The contrast between raising nominals and control nominals in English	p. 149
Obligatory control and morphological case	p. 152
Quirky case and the contrast between raising and control in Icelandic	p. 152
Apparent case-marked PROs	p. 160
The minimal-distance principle, control shift, and the logic of minimality	p. 169
Control with promise-type verbs	p. 171
Control shift	p. 176
Summary	p. 181
Partial and split control	p. 182
Partial control	p. 183
Split control	p. 190
Conclusion	p. 194
On non-obligatory control	p. 195
Introduction	p. 195
Obligatory vs. non-obligatory control and economy computations	p. 196
Some problems	p. 202
A proposal	p. 204
Conclusion	p. 209
Some notes on semantic approaches to control	p. 210
Introduction	p. 210
General problems with selectional approaches to obligatory control	p. 210
"Simpler syntax"	p. 216
Some putative problems for the movement theory of control	p. 217
Challenges for "Simpler syntax"	p. 226
Conclusion	p. 237
The movement theory of control and the minimalist program	p. 238
Introduction	p. 238
Movement within minimalism and the movement theory of control	p. 239
The movement theory of control and the minimalsit architecture of UG	p. 241
Inclusiveness, bare phrase structure, and the movement theory of control	p. 245
Conclusion	p. 248
References	p. 250
Index	p. 261
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