To appear in: Zwart & Abraham (eds.). Studies in Comparative Germanic Syntax: Proceedings of the 15th Workshop on Comparative Germanic Syntax. John Benjamins, Amsterdam (Linguis- tics Today). Syntactic vs. Semantic Control Susi Wurmbrand McGill University Abstract This paper investigates the interaction of the syntax and semantics of infinitival constructions. It is argued that there is a close connection between the syntactic structure (the presence vs. absence of an infinitival PRO subject) and the interpretation (obligatory vs. non-obligatory control) of infinitival constructions. The main claim is that obligatory control is determined lexically/semantically, whereas non-obligatory control is determined syntactically. While obligatory control is compatible with a subjectless (i.e., PRO-less) infinitive, non-obligatory control requires the presence of a syntactic PRO subject. Empirical evidence for the absence vs. presence of a syntactic PRO subject comes from the A-movement (restructuring) and binding properties in infinitival constructions. Finally, binding and the interpretation of it-anaphors shows that the correlation between obligatory control and the lack of a syntactic subject is only a one-way correlation and that the syntactic structure cannot be fully reduced to the semantic proper- ties. 1. Introduction The question of whether control infinitives include an embedded syntactic (PRO) subject (which goes hand in hand with the question of whether infinitives are clauses or smaller predicates) has been a longstanding issue in both the syntactic as well as the semantic literature. The common approach in the 80s was that control infinitives are clauses (IPs or CPs) syntactically and propo- sitions semantically. 1 One of the main reasons for the clausal nature of control infinitives in these theories had to do with the idea of uniformity of phrase structure. Since certain control infinitives can involve overt CP-material, control infinitives were generally considered to be clauses (whether they involve CP-material or not). The so-called PRO-theorem provided another theory- internal reason for a clausal structure of control infinitives. Since Chomsky’s Lectures on Gov- ernment and Binding, PRO has been assigned a special status—it is both anaphoric and pro- nominal. To avoid violations of binding theory, PRO had to be ungoverned. A C-projection in control infinitives was then necessary to protect PRO from government by the matrix verb. Fi- nally, assuming that control infinitives are interpreted as propositions (but see below for a differ- ent view), the Projection Principle, which states that an argument is present at all levels of repre- sentation, requires the presence of a (PRO) subject in the syntactic structure. A unified account for (all) control infinitives, however, has also been challenged in a vari- ety of works on infinitives. On the one hand, with the development of a Case-theoretic account of PRO (Chomsky & Lasnik 1993, Martin 1996) one of the major theoretical motivations for a 1. Throughout this paper, we will use the term proposition to refer to a clause/predicate including a subject (i.e., a predicate that does not have an unsaturated subject position).