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.

In this chapter, I pursue two main goals. First, I argue for a new empirical generalization: An external argument in German passive constructions is accessible from positions below it but inaccessible from positions above it. The evidence for downward accessibility comes from control into adjunct clauses, secondary predicates, and complement clauses, binding of reflexives and reciprocals, and disjoint reference effects. In contrast, the evidence for upward inaccessibility comes from long-distance binding in impersonal passives and standard passives, accessible subjects for control infinitives, criterial movement constraints, minimality of movement effects, and intervention for anaphoric binding. Second, I present a new theory of passivization from which this generalization can be derived: The elementary operation Remove accounts for both accessibility and inaccessibility of external arguments in the passive in German, by correctly predicting a short life cycle. After this, the chapter addresses the question of how variation in the area of passivization can be accounted for in the new model. Next, there is a brief extension of the analysis to adjectival passives, invoking external Remove. The chapter concludes with a discussion of alternative approaches that either maintain strict accessibility or postulate strict inaccessibility, as well of hybrid approaches.

This chapter is based on earlier work on Obligatory Control and Reflexivization in terms of movement. The point here is not to rehash the arguments for movement approaches to control and reflexive binding but to illustrate how movement approaches to construal are consequences of the EMH incorporating the FPG. The EMH/FPG implies that the non-local relation between an antecedent and Obligatory Control PRO (OCPRO) and a reflexive must be mediated by I-merge. In other words, descriptively speaking, such construal relations must “live on” A-chains. As this is effectively what movement theories of OC and Reflexivization have argued, and as the EMH/FPG implies movement theories of both, insofar as such movement theories are successful, to that extent they support the encompassing EMH/FPG theory. I review some arguments showing that movement plausibly underlies such dependencies. However, the discussion is not exhaustive; it is mainly illustrative. The reader is referred to the considerable literature on both topics for the full-scale defense of these movement approaches.