4 - Restructuring

Summary

This chapter develops an approach to restructuring with control verbs in German that is based on the operation Remove. The approaches to restructuring in infinitival constructions developed over the last three decades postulate either uniformly monoclausal structures or uniformly biclausal structures, that is, they do not actually rely on a concept of syntactic restructuring. Against this background, the goal of this chapter is to outline an approach to restructuring with control verbs in German that radically departs from standard approaches in that it presupposes that genuine syntactic restructuring does indeed exist, and can be held responsible for conflicting pieces of evidence that suggest both a monoclausal and a biclausal structure. The chapter is organized as follows. Following an illustration of infinitival constructions in German, I present conflicting evidence for restructuring with control verbs in German: There are arguments for a monoclausal analysis and there are arguments for a biclausal analysis. The Remove-based approach is shown to capture both the evidence for monoclausality and the evidence for biclausality.