Coherent Infinitives in German, Polish, and Spanish

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In this article I present a unified analysis of long scrambling (LS) (scrambling across sentence boundaries) out of infinitivals in German and Polish and clitic climbing (CC) (clitic movement across sentence boundaries) in Spanish. Infinitives exhibiting LS in German have been termed coherent infinitives by Bech (1955) whereas the phenomenon of infinitives allowing for clitic climbing (CC) in Spanish (and other Romance languages) is often named restructuring (see for example Napoli 1981, Bordelois 1986, Choe 1988). The terms coherent infinitives' and restructuring' refer to the observation that certain control verbs as well as ECM- and raising verbs can take infinitival complements that are not barriers for clause bounded processes. Although these infinitives are usually described in terms of a list of characteristics (see for example Haider 1986), it should be emphasized that a) empirical implications for other languages than German have not been discussed from a comparative perspective and b) the theoretical status of the concept of such infinitives is not clear. Restricting myself to control complements I will show that concerning a) LS in German and Polish and CC in Spanish show up with the same class of control complements, displaying an interesting parallel between the Slavic, Germanic and Romance languages from a typological point of view. Furthermore, concerning b), I will give a unified analysis of CC and LS by discussing lexically and structurally determined options, that make a bisentential representation behave syntactically like a monoclausal structure in German, Polish, and Spanish. I will argue that CC and LS are both licensed by the same mechanisms. To account for this fact I will introduce a theory of barriers and incorporation, apply it to the data presented and extend it to the impossibility of LS and CC in the presence of certain islands