What was the broad question that you most wanted to get an answer to during your time in the program?

As I was sitting in my office (2 years in building 20, 2 years in E39), the broad question that I most wanted to get an answer to was: When will I see daylight the next time? In a week? A month? After my defense?

In the little time left for me to consider other broad questions, I was mostly concerned with the question of control. I wanted to understand the fundamental mechanics of control, since I wasn’t satisfied with the existing proposals (which reduced control to binding or predication). I was also intrigued by the multi-dimensionality of control, and was eager to understand the precise division of labor between semantics, syntax and discourse in the formation and interpretation of control structures.

What is the current status of this question? Has it been answered? Did it turn out to be an ill-conceived question? If it’s a meaningful question as yet unanswered, please tell us what you think the path to an answer might be, or what obstacles make it a hard question.

The question, being as broad as it is, is still very much open. I don’t think it was ill-conceived, but I do think many people mistakenly assumed that control is a monolithic phenomenon, and that for this reason, the answer must be maximally simple. But it’s not. Ontologically, there are different types of control-like relations, and the big challenge of the field, in my opinion, is to converge on the right ontological classes. The distinction between obligatory and non-obligatory control is indeed a major one, but quite a few sub-distinctions within each of these broad categories are yet to be determined. The question is hard because of the usual inter-dependence of empirical categories and theoretical constructs. If one takes {a,b,c} to be a natural class, excluding {d,e}, then one is led to a particular theoretical outlook; whereas if one takes {a,b} to be a natural class, excluding {c,d,e}, then one is led to a different theoretical outlook. Since the classification itself is theory-laden, we are trapped in a vicious circle.

The way out, I think, is to enrich the empirical base, so that empirical correlations will emerge more decisively in establishing classes of data than theoretical considerations do. This has proved fruitful, for example, in the incorporation of finite control data into the mainstream literature. And I expect similar progress in other domains. Against the empirical progress, however, there are strong theoretical inclinations, mostly associated with “radical minimalism”. These inclinations, I believe, have not done well to the field of control. The heated debates around “movement vs. PRO” analyses of control have hardly produced novel insights or directed attention to neglected phenomena (with very few exceptions). Instead, they have diverted attention from real puzzles, sometimes classical ones, that have yet to be addressed.

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