Verb Constructions in German and Dutch

Verb Constructions in German and Dutch Synopsis

German and Dutch verb constructions show a rich array of syntactic phenomena that have so far been underexposed in the literature, despite the fact that they have proved to be a source of substantial problems in theoretical grammar. The cross-linguistic study of verb constructions and complementation has been dominated by views deriving from English or, for that matter, Latin. The German and Dutch complementation systems, however, feature several important properties that are missing from English but occur in many other languages. Well-known but only partially understood examples are clause-final verb clusters and the so-called Third Construction. In the present book, these and related phenomena are addressed by leading representatives of various schools of linguistic thought, in particular Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), Generative Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG), Performance Grammar, and Semantic Syntax. By bringing together the diverse theoretical analyses into one volume, the editors hope to stimulate comparative evaluations of the formalisms.