[LFG] Community proofreading of grammatical theory textbook

[Stefan Müller]

Dear colleagues,

I am in the process of finalizing my textbook on grammatical theory. The
book will be published by Language Science Press, which is a
scholar-owned, community-oriented publisher, which publishes books in
Diamond Open Access (free for readers and authors). Profit-oriented
publishers usually charge for publishing open access books between 5000€
and 15.000€ (Springer).

We want to get our community involved and guarantee high quality and low
costs and hence have the community take part in proofreading. So, if you
want to support Language Science Press, you may register as proofreader
and then volunteer to proofread one or more chapters of the grammar
theory textbook.

http://langsci-press.org/user/register

Proofreaders will be named in our Hall of Fame and in the books they
contributed to.

http://langsci-press.org/about/hallOfFame

Please read more about experiences with community-based publishing here:

http://userblogs.fu-berlin.de/langsci-press/2015/11/04/conversion-of-legacy-documents-and-community-publishing/

The grammar theory text book has interesting stuff for everbody on the
list. See information below and the following link to the book:

http://hpsg.fu-berlin.de/~stefan/Pub/grammatical-theory.html

So, if you are interested in proofreading parts of the book, please
register at the link given above or contact me or our coordinator
Sebastian Nordhoff directly. (Sebastian Nordhoff
<sebastian.nordhoff at langsci-press.org>)

Greetings from Berlin

Stefan (Müller)

This is the outline and a summary:

 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, Mim­i­mal­ism,
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.

Out­line

1    In­tro­duc­tion
2    Phrase Struc­ture Gram­mar
3    Trans­for­ma­tion­al Gram­mar – Gov­ern­ment & Bind­ing
4    Trans­for­ma­tion­al Gram­mar – Min­i­mal­ism
5    Gen­er­al­ized Phrase Struc­ture Gram­mar
6    Fea­ture De­scrip­tions
7    Lex­i­cal Func­tion­al Gram­mar
8    Cat­e­go­ri­al Gram­mar
9    Head-​Driv­en Phrase Struc­ture Gram­mar
10   Con­struc­tion Gram­mar
11   De­pen­den­cy Gram­mar
12   Tree Ad­join­ing Gram­mar
13   Inate­ness of lin­guis­tic knowl­edge
14    Gen­er­a­tive-​enu­mer­a­tive vs. mod­el-​the­o­ret­ic ap­proach­es
15    Com­pe­tence/per­for­mance dis­tinc­tion
16    Lan­guage ac­qui­si­tion
17    Bi­na­ry branch­ing
18    Gen­er­a­tive ca­pac­i­ty and gram­mat­i­cal for­malisms
19    Lo­cal­i­ty
20    Re­cur­sion
21    Empty El­e­ments
22    Ex­trac­tion, scram­bling, and pas­sive: one or sev­er­al
de­scrip­tive de­vices?
23    Phrasal vs. lex­i­cal anal­y­ses
24
25    Con­clu­sion