Aspects of sentence construction and the grammar of subordination have always been a key issue of German grammar description and theory. This diachronously and synchronously oriented study focuses not only on the creation of the ‘dass’ sentence but also on non-canonical subordinate-clause constructions such as argumental and relative clauses with main-clause word order (verb second, verb first) and correlative adverbial clauses. Thus the book contributes to the issue – recently much discussed– of the relationship between the formal and interpretative properties of subordination.