German: Syntactic Problems - Problematic Syntax

The volume assembles eleven articles presenting a linguistic approach to the grammar of German, English and the diachronic forerunners of English. Common to all is a theoretical discussion against the background of Chomskyan minimalism (1993) and more recent developments of it (Kayne 1993, Chomsky 1995), all of which make language typology comparisons an interesting proposition. Some of the articles are critical of certain aspects of these theoretical approaches. For all their claims to descriptive universality, it transpires that they fail to address a number of features specific to German.

Résumé
Over the past few decades, the book series Linguistische Arbeiten [Linguistic Studies], comprising over 500 volumes, has made a significant contribution to the development of linguistic theory both in Germany and internationally. The series will continue to deliver new impulses for research and maintain the central insight of linguistics that progress can only be made in acquiring new knowledge about human languages both synchronically and diachronically by closely combining empirical and theoretical analyses. To this end, we invite submission of high-quality linguistic studies from all the central areas of general linguistics and the linguistics of individual languages which address topical questions, discuss new data and advance the development of linguistic theory.

Contenu
Inhalt: Introduction 1. - W. Abraham, The Base Structure of the German Clause under Discourse Functional Weight: Contentful Functional Categories vs Derivative Ones. - H. Czepluch, Word Order in English: Old Problems and New Answers. - E. van Gelderen, Inflection and Movement in Old English. - H. Haider, Projective Economy. On the Minimal Functional Structure on the German Clause. - C.J.-W. Zwart, Transitive Expletive Constructions and the Evidence Supporting the Multiple Specifier Hypothesis. - Introduction 2. - A. Alexiadou/E. Anagnostopoulou, Toward a Uniform Account of Scrambling and Clitic Doubling. - K.K. Grohmann, Pronouns of the Left Periphery of West Germanic Embedded Clauses. - E. Mallen, Agreement and Case Matching in Noun Phrases in German. - J. te Velde, Deriving Conjoined XP's: A Minimal Deletion Approach. - Introduction 3. - Chr. Platzack, The Initial Hypotheses of Syntax: A Minimalist Perspective on Language Acquisition and Attrition. - R.A. Sprouse, The Acquisition of German and the "Initial Hypothesis of Language": A Reply to Platzack.