Gereon Müller, German Syntax: A Structure-Removal Approach (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 171). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025. Pp. xiv + 382.

This book offers a comprehensive account of German syntax within a novel theoretical approach.Departing from a fairly traditional, feature-driven, and phasebased version of Chomsky's (1995) Minimalist Program, Müller introduces Remove as a syntactic operation alongside Merge and Agree.Remove works as a mirror-image of Merge; while the latter builds syntactic structure, the former removes it.Müller convincingly shows that this operation can explain a number of syntactic phenomena which are difficult to handle within syntactic theory because they involve conflicting structure assignment, such as (long-distance) passives, restructuring configurations, and complex prefields in German.In addition to pursuing this analysis, the book also provides a comprehensive and very pedagogical introduction to German minimalist syntax.The book consists of eight chapters, an extensive bibliography, and a useful index.Following the order of these chapters, I will first provide a summary of Müller's minimalist syntactic machinery (Chapter 1), before we have a closer look at the novel operation Remove (Chapter 2) and its application throughout the book (Chapters 3-7).In the first chapter, Müller lays out the basics of structure building in German within his version of the minimalist framework.An architecture of the grammar is presented that can be placed somewhere in between purely lexicalist approaches, which assume the lexicon to be a separate, generative component of the grammar (Chomsky 1995), and non-lexicalist approaches such as Distributed Morphology, according to which the traditional lexicon is distributed across the syntactic component (see e.g.Harley & Noyer 1999).On Müller's approach, lexical items are associated with a phonological representation, an argument structure, and morphosyntactic features as they enter the syntactic derivation, in line with lexicalist assumptions, but he assumes that 'the lexicon is not a generative component' (p.7) and that there exists a pre-syntactic morphological component (i.e. the numeration) where lexical items are associated with non-inherent morphosyntactic features.