A minimalist theory of A-movement and control

In this article, we point out some problems in the theory of A-movement and control within Principles and Parameters models, and specifically within t he minimalist approach of Chomsky (1995). In order to overcome these proble ms, we motivate a departure from the standard transformational theory of A- movement. In particular, we argue that DPs are merged in the position where they surface, and from there they attract tan aspectual feature of a predi cate. On this basis, control can simply be construed as the special case in which the same DP attracts more than one predicate. Arbitrary control redu ces to the attraction of a predicate by an operator in C. We show that the basic locality properties of control follow from an appropriate Scopal vers ion of Chomsky's (1995) Minimal Link Condition and from Kayne's (1984) Conn ectedness, phrased as conditions on the Attract operation. Our approach has considerable advantages in standard cases of A-movement as well, deriving the distribution of reconstruction effects at LF as well as the blocking ef fects on phonosyntactic rules at PF. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rig hts reserved.