It has often been noted that Dutch (and Frisian) reflects a particular stage of development between German and English. Phonologically, syntactically and morphologically, Dutch and German are closely related languages. Yet, there remain sufficient morphosyntactic differences in terms of language development. The contributions of this collection focus on the relationships and differences of these neighbouring West Germanic languages.

It has often been noted that Dutch (and Frisian) reflects a particular stage of development between German and English. Phonologically, syntactically and morphologically, Dutch and German are closely related languages. Yet, there remain sufficient morphosyntactic differences in terms of language development. The contributions of this collection focus on the relationships and differences of these neighbouring West Germanic languages.

This book takes up a variety of general syntactic topics, which either yield different solutions in German, in particular, or which lead to different conclusions for theory formation. One of the main topics is the fact that languages that allow for extensive scrambling between the two verbal poles, V-2 and V-last, need to integrate discourse functions like thema and rhema into the grammatical description. This is attempted, in terms of Minimalism, thus extending the functional domain. Special attention is given to the asymmetrical scrambling behavior of indefinites vs. definites and their semantic interpretation. Related topics are: Transitive expletive sentences, types of existential sentences with either BE or HAVE, the that-trace phenomenon and its semantics, negative polarity items, ellipsis and gapping, passivization, double negation — all of which have extensive effects both on distributional behavior and semantic disambiguation, reaching far beyond effects observable in English with its rigid, ‘un-scrambable’ word order.

The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert

This monograph is the first book-length study on Old High German syntax from a generative perspective in twenty years. It provides an in-depth exploration of the Old High German pre-verb-second grammar by answering the following questions: To what extent did generalized verb movement exist in Old High German? Was there already obligatory XP-movement to the left periphery in declarative root clauses? What deviations from the linear verb-second restriction are attested and what do such phenomena reveal about the structure of the left sentence periphery? Did verb placement play the same role in sentence typing as in the modern verb-second languages? A further major topic is null subjects: It is claimed that Old High German was a partial pro-drop language. All these issues are addressed from a comparative-diachronic perspective by integrating research on other Old Germanic languages, in particular on Old English and Gothic. This book is of interest to all those working in the fields of comparative Germanic syntax and historical linguistics.

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.