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.

Inhalt

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.