Resumen de Identity Avoidance with Reflexive Clitics in European Portuguese and Minimalist Approaches to Control
Ana Maria Martins, Jairo Nunes
In this article, we discuss two types of cooccurrence restrictions involving reflexive clitics in European Portuguese and examine their implications for obligatory control. We argue that these restrictions may shed some light on where the controller is generated, thus making it possible to empirically test three Minimalist approaches to control: the predicate attraction approach (see Manzini and Roussou 2000), the PRO-based approach (e.g., Chomsky and Lasnik 1993, Landau 2000, 2004, Martin 2001), and the movement approach (e.g., Hornstein 1999, 2001, Boeckx, Hornstein, and Nunes 2010). We show that none of the approaches is able to capture all the relevant data if pursued under a strong lexicalist perspective such as Chomsky’s (1993, 2000) and that only the movement approach can account for all the data in a uniform way under Chomsky’s (2001) weak lexicalist perspective.
