[HPSG-L] Book on grammatical theory ready for open review

[Stefan Müller]

Dear colleagues,

I am pleased to announce the publication of my new book (787 pages)

Gram­ma­ti­cal theo­ry: From trans­for­ma­tio­nal gram­mar to
cons­traint-​ba­sed ap­proa­ches

in the series Textbooks in Language Sciences by Language Science Press,
Berlin.

http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/25

(more on the content of the book below)

Language Science Press is a new scholar-owned publisher that publishes
high quality peer reviewed books.

In addition to traditional peer reviewing we allow for a post-acceptance
open review phase. For a description of the quality assurance see this
blog post:

http://userblogs.fu-berlin.de/langsci-press/2015/03/14/quality-assurance-and-open-reviewing/

On open reviewing in general see this one:

http://userblogs.fu-berlin.de/langsci-press/2015/05/27/axes-of-open-review/

My grammatical theory book is the first one to enter the open review
process. If you want to contribute, please let me know. We will wait for
two weeks for expressions of interest. If there is interest in open
reviewing there will be an open review phase of two months.

Open reviews will get a DOI and will be published together with the open
review version that will still be available on the web. Such reviews may
contain remarks that will result in an improvement of the final book or
they may be of a more general type in the format of a book review as it
might appear in a traditional journal.


Now for the content of the book:

This book introduces formal grammar theories that play a role in current
linguistics or contributed tools that are relevant for 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,
Dependency Grammar). The key assumptions are explained and it is shown
how each 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.

In a final part of the book the approaches are compared with respect to
their predictions regarding language acquisition and psycholinguistic
plausibility. The nativism hypothesis that claims that humans
posses genetically determined innate language-specific knowledge is
examined critically and alternative models of language acquisition are
discussed. In addition this more general part addresses issues that are
discussed controversially in current theory building such as the
question whether flat or binary branching structures are 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 that are suggested in the various frameworks
are often translatable into each other. The book closes with a section
that shows how properties that are common to all languages or to certain
language classes can be captured.


Best wishes

        Stefan Müller