Grammatical theory: From transformational grammar to constraint-based approaches

Stefan Müller  

Synopsis

This book introduces formal grammar theories that play a role in current linguistic theorizing (Phrase Structure Grammar, Transformational Grammar/Government & Binding, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Head-​Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Construction
Grammar, Tree Adjoining Grammar). The key assumptions are explained and it is shown how the respective theory treats arguments and adjuncts, the active/passive alternation, local reorderings, verb placement, and fronting of constituents over long distances. The analyses are explained with German as the object language.

The second part of the book compares these approaches with respect to their predictions regarding language acquisition and psycholinguistic plausibility. The nativism hypothesis, which assumes that humans posses genetically determined innate language-specific knowledge, is critically examined and alternative models of language acquisition are discussed. The second part then addresses controversial issues of current theory building such as the question of flat or binary branching structures being more appropriate, the question whether constructions should be treated on the phrasal or the lexical level, and the question whether abstract, non-visible entities should play a role in syntactic analyses. It is shown that the analyses suggested in the respective frameworks are often translatable into each other. The book closes with a chapter showing how properties common to all languages or to certain classes of languages can be captured.

This book is a new edition of http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/25, http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/195http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/255 , and http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/287.

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Author Biography

Stefan Müller, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin

Stefan Müller studied Computer Science, Computational Linguistics and Linguistics at the Humboldt University at Berlin and in Edinburgh. He worked at the German Research Center of Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Saarbrücken and for the company Interice. He worked as acting chair for German and Computational Linguistics in Jena and for Theoretical Computational Linguistics in Potsdam. He had an assistant professorship in Bremen for theoretical linguistics and computational linguistics, a full professorship for German and General Linguistics at the Freie Universität Berlin and is now professor for German language with specialization in syntax at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

His main re­search topic is Ger­man gram­mar. He works both em­pir­i­cal­ly and the­o­ret­i­cal­ly. Top­ics of in­ter­est are mor­phol­o­gy, syn­tax, se­man­tics, and in­for­ma­tion struc­ture. He pub­lished main­ly about Ger­man, but he also works on other lan­guages as for in­stance Man­darin Chi­nese, Dan­ish, Maltese, and Per­sian. The the­o­ret­i­cal work is car­ried out in the framework of Head-​Driv­en Phrase Struc­ture Gram­mar (HPSG) and the theoret­i­cal anal­y­ses are im­ple­ment­ed in com­put­er-​pro­cess­able gram­mar fragments. The gram­mar frag­ments that are implemented in the CoreGram Project use a com­mon core. One goal of his re­search is to un­der­stand lan­guage and to find out what lan­guages in gen­er­al and cer­tain lan­guage class­es in par­tic­u­lar have in com­mon.

book cover

Published

January 19, 2023
LaTeX source on GitHub
Cite as
Müller, Stefan. 2023. Grammatical theory: From transformational grammar to constraint-based approaches. (Textbooks in Language Sciences 1). Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.7376662

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Details about the available publication format: PDF

PDF

ISBN-13 (15)

978-3-96110-402-4

doi

10.5281/zenodo.7376662

Details about the available publication format: Softcover

Softcover

ISBN-13 (15)

978-3-98554-060-0

Physical Dimensions

170mm x 240mm