Hornstein, Control, and Minimalism

[Yehuda N. Falk]

All,

I find myself catching up on some back reading from earlier this year, and
I ran across an article that appeared in this year's first issue of LI. The
article, by Hornstein, is entitled "Movement and Control." In the article,
Hornstein demolishes PRO from the perspective of Minimalism, and argues
that "obligatory" control/equi should be treated as movement, just like
raising, and "nonobligatory" control/equi involves an empty pronominal
(pro), just as in pro-drop constructions. In other words, the division of
control constructions is not raising vs. equi, but rather
raising-plus-oblig-equi vs. nonoblig equi.

Am I hallucinating, or is this essentially a notational variant of the LFG
treatment of raising and "obligatory" equi as f-structural feature sharing
(an analogue of movement) and "nonobligatory" equi as involving an
f-structure pronoun? Naturally, there was no mention in the article of
similarities to ideas that have been raised in other theoretical frameworks.



                             Yehuda N. Falk
                        (until 4 February 2000:)
             Department of Linguistics, Stanford University
                        Stanford, California, USA
                             (permanent:)
        Department of English, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
                      Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem, Israel

                         msyfalk at mscc.huji.ac.il
            until 4 February also: yfalk at leland.stanford.edu
       Personal Web Site    http://pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il/~msyfalk/
      Departmental Web Site    http://atar.mscc.huji.ac.il/~english/

"And because,  in all the galaxy, they had found  nothing more precious than
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