Moving Forward with Romanian Backward Control and Raising

Abstract

This chapter investigates various licensing constraints imposed on shared subject arguments in Romanian obligatory control constructions and argues for an analysis of obligatory control (OC) in this language analogous to that of raising predicates. On the one hand, the discussion contributes to the current debate with respect to whether OC can and should be construed as raising or not (i.e. the Hornstein–Landau debate1), and on the other hand, the analysis provides an account of seemingly optional subject dislocation that is intimately tied to the Theme–Rheme sentence partitioning in Romanian and, consequently, independent of the control phenomenon per se. With respect to the first point, I propose that movement out of controlled clauses is a parametrized option made available by UG and governed by well-defined conditions. Specifically, it is available in languages where complements to control verbs lack phasal status, or can void phasehood, a proviso that guarantees an active subject goal available to both thematic and non-thematic checking operations with matrix probes. Regarding the second point, I show that dislocation of the subject DP, which may but need not occur, is not incumbent on morpho-syntactic featural requirements related to OC (such as Case or theta-role valuation), but determined by well-defined semantico-pragmatic constraints, such as topic and focus movement, construable as OCC features (Chomsky 2001b) on the various probing heads. This analysis has the merit of limiting the amount of movement required by reductionist approaches to OC, accounting for optionality in a systematic manner, and providing adequate empirical coverage of the phenomena under discussion.