O. THE CONTENTS OF THIS VOLUME AND THE FIELD OF COMPARATIVE GERMANIC SYNTAX Comparati ve synchronic and diachronic syntax has become an increasingly popular and fruitful research area over the past 10-15 years. A central reason for this is that recent developments in linguistic theory have made it possible to formulate explicit and testable hypotheses concerning syntactic universals and cross-linguistic varia tion. Here we refer to the so-called "Principles-and-Parameters" approaches (see Chomsky 1981a, 1982, 1986a, and also Williams 1987, Freidin 1991, Chomsky and Lasnik 1993, and references cited in these works). It may even be fair to say that the Government-Binding framework (first outlined by Chomsky 1981b)-a spe cific instantiation of the Principles-and-Parameters approach-has been more influential than any other theoretical syntactic framework. Since 1984, syntacticians investigating the formal properties of Germanic languages have, as an international effort, organized "workshops" on comparative Germanic syntax. The first was held at the University of Trondheim in Trondheim, Norway (1984), the second at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik, Iceland (1985), the third at the University of Abo in Abo, Finland (1986), the fourth at McGill University, Montreal, Canada (1987), the fifth in Groningen, The Nether lands (1988), the sixth in Lund, Sweden (1989), the seventh in Stuttgart, Germany (1991), the eighth in Troms~, Norway (1992), the ninth at Harvard University, Cambridge, USA (1994), the tenth at the Catholic University in Brussels, Belgium (1995), and the eleventh at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, USA (1995).

Autorentext
Steve Peter is a writer, typographer, programmer and teacher responsible for maintaining the typesetting toolchain used by the Pragmatic Bookshelf. Trained as a linguist, he spends much of his time writing TeX and tweaking text. Since writing his first program in Fortran, he has been hooked on programming languages. Steve has long been programming the Mac with Objective-C and is an active member of the New York City chapter of Cocoa Heads.

Inhalt
A Change in Structural Case Marking in Early Middle English.- Deficient Pronouns: A View from Germanic. A Study in the Unified Description of Germanic and Romance.- Semantic Variables and Object Shift.- Very Exceptional Case Marking.- Functional Categories, Cliticization, and Verb Movement in the Early Germanic Languages.- The Shift to Head-Initial VP in Germanic.- Null Subjects, Weak Agr and Syntactic Differences in Scandinavian.- The Argumental Licensing of Perfect Tense.- Prepositions and Minimalist Case Marking.- N-Feature Checking in Germanic Verb Second Configurations.- List of Contributors.- Language Index.- Name Index.