This chapter develops an analysis of long-distance passives in German according to which these constructions basically emerge from the co-occurrence of passivization and restructuring in the language. In Chapters 3 and 4, I have argued that passivization and restructuring both involve an operation of structure removal in the course of the derivation – of an external argument DP in the first case, and of CP and TP layers of an infinitive in the second case. The null hypothesis that is pursued in this chapter against this background is that a combination of the two structure removal operations essentially gives rise to the intricate properties of long-distance passives in German. A core feature of the analysis is that it does not involve any long-distance relation at any point; argument demotion, case assignment, and morphological realization as passive all take place extremely locally. Another basic property of the new approach, which sets it apart from other analyses, is that all DP arguments selected by the verbs involved (including in particular external arguments in the embedded and matrix domains) can be assumed to be structurally represented at some point of the derivation; among other things, this accounts for the absence of control shift.

The properties of raising and control verbs that we discuss in this chapter can be summarized as follows. Unlike a control predicate, a raising predicate does not assign a semantic role to its subject (or object). The absence of a semantic role can be used to account for the possibility of expletive it or there, or a part of an idiom, as subject or object of a raising predicate, and the impossibility of such expressions as subjects of control predicates. Among control predicates, the VP complement’s unexpressed subject is coindexed with one of the syntactic dependents. Among raising predicates, the entire syntactic-semantic value of the subject of the infinitival VP is shared with that of one of the dependents of the predicate. This ensures that whatever category is required by the raising predicate’s VP complement is the raising predicate’s subject (or object). These properties of the raising and control verbs follow naturally from their lexical specifications. In particular, the present analysis offers a systematic, construction-based account of the mismatch between the number of syntactic complements that a verb has and the number of semantic arguments that it has.