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The article presents information on the grammatical constructions referred to as raising and control. Raising and control have been central concerns of generative syntax since the 1960s. Peter Rosenbaum's book "The grammar of English predicate complement constructions," proposed the seminal generative account of raising and control constructions.

Historically, control in generative grammar has fallen within the province of syntactic theory. One primary reason for this is that Mainstream Generative Grammar (MGG) has imposed a strong uniformity criterion on analyses as a measure of their explanatory adequacy. One aspect of this uniformity criterion, which we call Interface Uniformity, holds that the syntax-semantics interface is maximally simple, in that meaning maps transparently into syntactic structure, and that it is maximally uniform, so that the same meaning always maps into the same syntactic structure. It follows from Interface Uniformity that a nonfinite VP has a syntactic subject that is assigned its external θ-role. We argue that this view is most sustainable if one does not take into account the full richness and complexity of control phenomena, but treats control strictly in terms of complementation. When a fuller range of phenomena is taken into account, it appears that it is preferable to "turn over control" to the semantics, which is better equipped to capture the facts. We outline how to formulate the syntax-semantics interface so as to get the semantic facts to line up properly with the syntactic facts. This analysis of the interface extends naturally to raising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Control has played an important role in theoretical debates within the Minimalist Program. This is so because control implicates notions such as module, θ-role, the Last Resort nature of syntactic operations, movement, binding, chains, Case, complementation, and more. Hornstein (1999) has controversially claimed that control is a subspecies of movement. That is, control is just like familiar instances of raising, except that it involves movement into an additional θ-position. If correct, the movement analysis has important conceptual and empirical repercussions, some of which are examined here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper defends three interconnected claims: (a) selection is the only licensing procedure available to UG, specifically, checking is an instance of selection; (b) selection obtains in the mutual c-command configuration; and (c) though a head does not mutually c-command its own specifier, it mutually c-commands the specifier of its complement. A head may therefore license the specifier of its complement (as well as its complement) but not its own specifier (it is not local enough). This effectively eliminates the spec-head configuration from the repertoire of syntactic configurations, in favor of a unified notion of locality strictly identifiable with mutual c-command, a symmetric configuration. The discussion shows that a theory that collapses these distinctions remains empirically discriminating. The resulting theory is therefore genuinely reductionist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]