Gereon Müller

Exploring the major syntactic phenomena of German, this book provides a state-of-the-art account of German syntax, as well as an outline of the key aspects of Chomsky's Minimalist Program. It is one of the first comprehensive studies of the entire syntactic component of a natural language within the Minimalist Program, covering core issues including clause structure, binding, case, agreement, control, and movement. It introduces a phase-based theory of syntax that establishes Remove, an operation that removes syntactic structure, as a mirror image of Merge, which builds syntactic structure. This unified approach resolves many cases of conflicting structure assignments in syntax, as they occur with passivization, restructuring, long-distance passivization, complex prefields, bridge verbs, applicatives, null objects, pseudo-noun incorporation, nominal concord, and ellipsis. It will pave the way for similar research into other languages and is essential reading for anyone interested in the syntax of German, syntactic theory, or the Minimalist Program.

Harmonic serialism is an active research programme in phonology and syntax but has so far not been pursued in morphology. This book delivers a proof of concept: It shows that harmonic serialism can be substantiated as a viable approach to inflectional morphology, covering roughly the same ground as standard models like Distributed Morphology or Paradigm Function Morphology. Furthermore, based on empirical evidence from a variety of typologically different languages, Inflectional Morphology in Harmonic Serialism offers a fresh perspective on the composition of inflected words that is made possible by a strictly derivational orientation incorporating repeated optimization procedures. This gives rise to new and convincing solutions to some recalcitrant problems in inflectional morphology, related to phenomena like affix order, extended exponence, disjunctive blocking, non-local stem allomorphy, *ABA patterns, impoverishment effects, deponency, and paradigm gaps. The book introduces harmonic serialism from scratch and develops morphological analyses against the background of applications of the theory in phonology and syntax. It will be of use to students and scholars interested in morphology, phonology, syntax, and grammatical theory more generally.

Incomplete Category Fronting is a detailed investigation of the syntax of incomplete category fronting in German, carried out from a cross-linguistic perspective. The study presents a wealth of empirical evidence involving unbound traces created by remnant topicalization, wh-movement, scrambling, left dislocation, and extraposition. Four characteristic properties of remnant movement are identified that pose severe problems for a representational movement theory. It is argued that these properties can be fruitfully addressed on the basis of Chomsky's minimalist program, and that they follow from a derivational movement theory that incorporates the Barriers Condition, the Strict Cycle Condition, Fewest Steps, Last Resort, and the Minimal Link Condition but completely dispenses with surface filters. Incomplete Category Fronting provides an empirical underpinning for the minimalist program and presents a powerful argument for a derivational theory of grammar. Audience: Incomplete Category Fronting will interest all linguists working on theoretical syntax, Germanic syntax or the syntax-semantics interface.

Incomplete Category Fronting is a detailed investigation of the syntax of incomplete category fronting in German, carried out from a cross-linguistic perspective. The study presents a wealth of empirical evidence involving unbound traces created by remnant topicalization, wh-movement, scrambling, left dislocation, and extraposition. Four characteristic properties of remnant movement are identified that pose severe problems for a representational movement theory. It is argued that these properties can be fruitfully addressed on the basis of Chomsky's minimalist program, and that they follow from a derivational movement theory that incorporates the Barriers Condition, the Strict Cycle Condition, Fewest Steps, Last Resort, and the Minimal Link Condition but completely dispenses with surface filters. Incomplete Category Fronting provides an empirical underpinning for the minimalist program and presents a powerful argument for a derivational theory of grammar. Audience: Incomplete Category Fronting will interest all linguists working on theoretical syntax, Germanic syntax or the syntax-semantics interface.

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