Framing the syntax of control in Japanese (and English)

This chapter explores Control properties of adverbial clauses consisting of an accusative NP and a locative PP headed by ni, and presents evidence for an Obligatory Control (OC) analysis of this adverbial, showing that syntactic OC in Japanese is blocked in the presence of TP. These blocking effects are due to event-features associated with the TP projection. We formalize this observation by amending Hornstein’s (1999) proposal for elimination of the Theta-criterion. This extension of Hornstein’s proposal asserts that an NP cannot move directly from an event-checking position to a Theta-checking position, and allows for NP movement through an event-denoting TP just in case the NP does not acquire additional Theta-roles in the next step of the derivation.