ABOUT THIS BOOK
This book applies the highly constrained grammatical framework of Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar of the syntax of German, focusing on the complex interaction of word order phenomena and constituent structure. Uszkoreit modifies and extends this framework to permit the adequate treatment of partially free word order as it occurs in German and probably to some degree in all natural languages. Through Uszkoreit's redefined notion of linear precedence rules, it has become possible for the first time to present a formalized analysis of the interaction of the competing syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and stylistic principles that determine the order of arguments and adjuncts.

Most of the book is dedicated to the proof that a phrase-structure-grammar model can offer an adequate description of a language with much freer word order than English and at the same time provide new insights in the structure of this language. A highly concentrated and elegant grammar fragment is given, which offers intuitive analyses for such notoriously problematic phenomena as (1) word order differences between main clauses and subordinate clauses, (2) the second position of the finite verb in assertion main clauses, (3) the order among main, auxiliary, and modal verbs, (4) the derivation and distribution of separable prefix verbs, and (5) the partially free order among verb complements and adjuncts.