5 - Long-Distance Passive

Summary

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.