role of 'to infinitive'

While I discussed above issue with a local person later, he advised me as follows about his analysis. How much reasonable do you think his opinion is?;

1. the original sentence is ‘It cost 70% less to construct it than a normal building, as recycled material was used.’.

- first ‘it’; preparatory it

- ‘to construct it’; extraposed subject phrase

2. by the rule of ‘tough-Movement’(object raising) the ‘it’ after ‘construct’ has been raised to the beginning.

3. then, we have ‘It cost 70% less to construct than a normal building ~ .’;

- ‘it’ is a referring pronoun. (which might be a kind of building made of plastic bottles, etc.)

- ‘to construct’; modifying the verb ‘cost’

4. his analysis is based on following ground;

With verbal predicates, Tough-Movement seems to be restricted to take and synonyms such as cost, require or need:

(12) This questionnaire should not require/take/need more than ten minutes to complete.

(13) This building will cost more than a million pounds to repair.

* source;

https://www.academia.edu/24437...a_Corpus_Based_Study_

(writer: Christian Mair (English Linguistics), Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, English Department, Faculty Member, Professor of English)