In this squib, I present an empirical argument from Icelandic that the movement theory of control (MTC) is on the wrong track—or at best, does not achieve what it purports to achieve. I depart from previous discussion, which has focused on the fact that Icelandic PRO bears case, and show that the MTC would require violating locality constraints on A-movement that raising infinitives do not violate. Since the goal of the MTC is to account for the properties of control sentences on the basis of mechanisms independently needed within the Minimalist Program, this difference in the locality domains of raising and control dependencies constitutes another challenge for the MTC.
The conclusion from the recent debate on Icelandic obligatory control (OC) (Boeckx and Hornstein 2006, Sigurðsson 2008, Bobaljik and Landau 2009, Boeckx, Hornstein, and Nunes 2010b) is often taken to be that Icelandic shows that OC...