Chapter 3 discusses how subject–verb agreement and agreement within noun phrases are realized in European and Brazilian Portuguese and proposes a reinterpretation of the traditional analysis of agreement with personal pronouns in Portuguese.

Chapter 5 discusses possible orders other than SVO in European and Brazilian Portuguese and the discourse and morphophonological factors that trigger them

Chapter 1 outlines the content of the remaining chapters and describes how the data are represented throughout the book.

Chapter 7 discusses affirmation, negation, yes/no (polar) questions, and answers in European and Brazilian Portuguese, paying special attention to the way in which each variety grammatically encodes these locutions in non-neutral contexts.

Chapter 6 discusses the distribution and interpretation of null objects and null possessors in European and Brazilian Portuguese.

Chapter 2 describes the feature composition of personal pronouns in European and Brazilian Portuguese, focusing on their similarities and differences with respect to each grammatical person.

Chapter 8 reviews the major syntactic similarities and differences between European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese discussed in the previous chapters, showing how they are organically articulated.

Chapter 4 examines the distribution and interpretation of null subjects in European and Brazilian Portuguese.

Introduction

Up to very recently, there had been a more or less uncontroversial view that control phenomena should be analyzed in terms of special grammatical primitives (e.g., PRO) and construction-specific interpretive systems (e.g., the control module). In this chapter, we examine how this conception of control was instantiated in the standard-theory framework (section 2.3), in GB (section 2.4), and in non-movement analyses within the minimalist program (section 2.5), briefly outlining what we take to be the virtues and problems of each approach. This discussion will provide the general background for us to discuss the core properties of (our version of) the MTC in Chapter 3 and evaluate its adequacy in the face of the general desiderata for grammatical downsizing explored in the minimalist program.

What any theory of control should account for

A theoretically sound approach to control – one that goes beyond the mere listing of the properties involved in control – must meet (at least) the following four requirements.

First, it must specify the kinds of control structures that are made available by UG and explain how and why they differ. Assuming, for instance, that obligatory control (OC) and non-obligatory control (NOC) are different, their differences should be reduced to more basic properties of the system.

Second, it must correctly describe the configurational properties of control, accounting for the positions that the controller and the controllee can occupy. In addition, it should provide an account as to why the controller and the controllee are so configured.

Introduction

In this chapter we discuss a fair sample of the empirical challenges that have been perceived by many as providing lethal counter-arguments to the MTC.

We will start with apparent problems that stem from contrasts between raising and control constructions. Sections 5.2 and 5.3 examine cases where raising is not allowed, but control is. Sections 5.4 discusses cases in which the different morphological patterns associated with raising and control have been interpreted as showing that control constructions involve a case-marked PRO. In sections 5.5, we examine control constructions involving promise-type verbs and control-shift phenomena, which appear to be at odds with the minimality assumptions underlying the MTC. Finally, in sections 5.6 we discuss partial and split control, which at first sight seem to require the postulation of PRO, as the controllee appears to be distinct from the controller.

As the reader will see, the apparent problems have more to do with a proper characterization of the relevant constructions than with the MTC itself. It is beyond the tenets of this chapter to offer an independent full-fledged account of each of them. However, we will show that, under very reasonable assumptions (most of which are standard in GB and/or minimalism), the apparently problematic data can receive a streamlined analysis under the MTC and in many cases turn out to actually provide compelling evidence in its favor.