Journal of Historical Syntax

Benjamin L. Sluckin & Eric Fuss. This paper offers a syntactic and diachronic analysis of the German [‘gehen + zu’-infinitive] construction. Previously misclassified as a periphrastic anticausative or conflated with canonical modal passives, the configuration represents a structurally distinct periphrastic realization of the middle voice. Synchronically, modal ‘gehen’ operates as a functional raising head that strictly selects a voiceless, eventive vP and a resultative configuration — a selectional restriction that directly accounts for the construction’s rigid lexical-semantic preference for Accomplishments. The raising head carries a formal edge feature forcing internal argument raising, which feeds dispositional evaluation at the conceptual-intentional interface. The resulting feature valuation simultaneously bleeds temporal auxiliary insertion and triggers post-syntactic ‘zu’-insertion as a morphotactic repair. Historical corpus data spanning the 15th to 20th centuries show that the ‘gehen’-middle emerged rapidly across the 18th and 19th centuries via a two-stage grammaticalization pathway: the lexical motion verb first underwent a semantic shift toward possibility, extending analogically into clausal control infinitives; ambiguous control structures were then reanalysed as monoclausal raising configurations. This reanalysis stripped the infinitival complement of its clausal architecture, reducing it to a bare vP, and bleached the matrix verb of its thematic subject, producing the constrained functional raising head attested in Present-Day German.