In this article, we discuss two types of cooccurrence restrictions involving reflexive clitics in European Portuguese and examine their implications for obligatory control. We argue that these restrictions may shed some light on where the controller is generated, thus making it possible to empirically test three Minimalist approaches to control: the predicate attraction approach (see Manzini and Roussou 2000 ), the PRO-based approach (e.g., Chomsky and Lasnik 1993 , Landau 2000 , 2004 , Martin 2001 ), and the movement approach (e.g., Hornstein 1999 , 2001 , Boeckx, Hornstein, and Nunes 2010 ). We show that none of the approaches is able to capture all the relevant data if pursued under a strong lexicalist perspective such as Chomsky’s ( 1993 , 2000 ) and that only the movement approach can account for all the data in a uniform way under Chomsky’s (2001) weak lexicalist perspective.

This article discusses the challenges that Bobaljik and Landau (2009) pose to Boeckx and Hornstein's (2006) movement-based analysis of control in Icelandic. We show in detail that contrary to what Bobaljik and Landau claim, the movement theory of control (with a modification to accommodate quirky Case, a specialty of Icelandic) makes the right empirical cuts regarding the issues they raise, namely, (a) the differences in Case agreement between control and raising constructions, (b) the different patterns of Case transmission (un)available, and (c) the fact that allegedly Case-marked PROs are phonetically null. We argue that rather than being problematic, the data bearing on these issues actually provide independent support to the movement theory of control.

Three different formal devices have been proposed within minimalism to replace Chomsky's (1993) covert movement of phrasal categories to check Case and agreement: expletive-associate relations (Brody 1995), movement of formal features (Chomsky 1995), and the operation Agree (Chomsky 2000, 2001). We propose that vehicle change effects (in the sense articulated by Fiengo and May (1994)) establish empirical grounds for distinguishing among these alternatives and argue that only the Move F approach can account for the data without enriching the theoretical apparatus.

Assuming the general framework of the Minimalist Program of Chomsky 1995, this article argues that Move is not a primitive operation of the computational system, but rather the output of the interaction among the independent operations Copy, Merge, Form Chain, and Chain Reduction (deletion of chain links for purposes of linearization). The crucial aspect of this alternative model is that it permits constrained instances of sideward movement , whereby a given constituent “moves” from a syntactic object K to an independent syntactic object L. This version of the copy theory of movement (a) provides an explanation for why (some) traces must be deleted in the phonological component, (b) provides a cyclic analysis for standard instances of noncyclic movement, and (c) accounts for the main properties of parasitic gap and across-the-board extraction constructions.