Grammatical theory

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This book explores formal grammar theories essential to contemporary linguistic theorizing, including Phrase Structure Grammar, Transformational Grammar, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Construction Grammar, and Tree Adjoining Grammar. It elucidates key assumptions and demonstrates how each theory addresses arguments and adjuncts, active/passive alternation, local reorderings, verb placement, and long-distance constituent fronting, using German as the primary language for analysis. The second part evaluates these theories concerning their predictions on language acquisition and psycholinguistic plausibility. It critically examines the nativism hypothesis, which posits that humans have genetically determined, innate language-specific knowledge, and discusses alternative models of language acquisition. Additionally, it tackles contentious issues in current theoretical frameworks, such as the appropriateness of flat versus binary branching structures, the treatment of constructions at the phrasal versus lexical level, and the role of abstract, non-visible entities in syntactic analyses. The analyses across these frameworks are often intertranslatable. The book concludes by discussing how shared properties across all languages or specific language classes can be understood.