LINGUIST List 12.1333

Tue May 15 2001

Books: Syntax

Editor for this issue: Naomi Ogasawara <naomilinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Kim Lewis Brown, Syntax: Constraint-Based Approaches to Germanic Syntax

CSLI Publications is pleased to announce the availability of:

Meurers, W. Detmar (The Ohio State University), Kiss, Tibor 
(Ruhr-Universit�t Bochum), eds.; 
CONSTRAINT-BASED APPROACHES TO GERMANIC SYNTAX; 
paper ISBN: 1-57586-304-9, $25.00; 
cloth ISBN: 1-57586-303-0, $67.50, 300 pages. CSLI Publications 2001. 
http://cslipublications.stanford.edu 
email: pubscsli.stanford.edu.

To order this book, contact The University of Chicago Press. Call
their toll free order number 1-800-621-2736 (U.S. & Canada only) or
order online at http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ 
(use the search feature to locate the book, then order).

Book description:

A wealth of research has been conducted on the various linguistic
phenomena found in Germanic languages. But these studies were
restricted by their use of only one theoretical perspective to analyze
one particular language. Inspired by the need to expand the research
base of Germanic languages while broadening the empirical coverage of
constraint-based linguistic approaches, a handful of researchers are
employing various constraint-based theoretical perspectives to study
multiple Germanic languages.

This volume begins with an introduction to the recent research
performed on Germanic syntax using constraint-based frameworks. It
then goes on to investigate the linguistic phenomena found in the
grammar of the German and Danish languages. Using such approaches as
Lexical-Functional Grammar and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar,
contributors shed a different light on theoretical issues addressed by
past studies, including semi-free word order, partial front phenomena,
and complex predicate formation. While alternative approaches have
assumed that meaning (semantics) is dependent on form (syntax),
various analyses presented in this volume explore the idea that both
form and meaning are equally constitutive for grammatical
descriptions.