Control as Movement

by Cedric Boeckx, Norbert Hornstein, Jairo Nunes

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521195454
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	08/26/2010
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Linguistics , #126
Pages:	274
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Cedrick Boeckx is Research Professor at the Catalan Institute for Advanced Studies (ICREA), and a member of the Center for Theoretical Linguistics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

Norbert Hornstein is Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Jairo Nunes is Associate Professor at the University of São Paulo, Brazil.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction; 2. Some historical background; 3. Basic properties of the Movement Theory of Control; 4. Empirical advantages; 5. Empirical challenges and solutions; 6. On non-obligatory control; 7. Some notes on semantic approaches to control; 8. The movement theory of control and the minimalist program.