German: Syntactic Problems – Problematic Syntax

✍ Scribed by Werner Abraham (editor); Elly van Gelderen (editor)

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 332
• Series: Linguistische Arbeiten; 374
• Edition: Reprint 2017
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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.

✦ Table of Contents

Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction I
Minimalism: Why it is not 'the end of syntax'
The base structure of the German clause under discourse functional weight: contentful functional categories vs. derivative functional categories
Word order in English: old problems and new answers
Inflection and movement in Old English
Projective Economy
Transitive expletive constructions and the evidence supporting the Multiple Specifier Hypothesis
Introduction II
The Minimalist Program
Toward a uniform account of scrambling and clitic doubling
Pronouns and the left periphery of West Germanic embedded clauses
Agreement and case matching in noun phrases in German
Deriving conjoined XPs: a minimal deletion approach
Introduction III
Word order and language acquisition – Kayne’s universal directionality restriction
The Initial Hypothesis of syntax: A Minimalist perspective on language acquisition and attrition
The acquisition of German and the “Initial Hypothesis of Syntax”: A reply to Platzack
Addresses of authors
General index of subjects