These essays apply the syntactic theory of Carl Pollard and Ivan Sag—Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG)—to a formal study and analysis of German grammar. A wide variety of fundamental and well-known phenomena in German grammar are addressed, including the German passive and impersonal passive, various Mittelfeld and Vorfeld word-order phenomena (including auxiliary stacking and the distribution of adjuncts), and the structure of phrasal constituents. Linguistic issues include the treatment of idioms, word-order variation and phrase structure constituency, subcategorization, complementation, argument structure, case assignment, lexical rules, and syntactic ambiguity.

The theoretical background for these essays can be found in Information-Based Syntax and Semantics and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, both by Pollard and Sag and both available from the University of Chicago Press.

This book presents the most complete exposition of the theory of head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG), introduced in the authors' Information-Based Syntax and Semantics. HPSG provides an integration of key ideas from the various disciplines of cognitive science, drawing on results from diverse approaches to syntactic theory, situation semantics, data type theory, and knowledge representation. The result is a conception of grammar as a set of declarative and order-independent constraints, a conception well suited to modelling human language processing.

This self-contained volume demonstrates the applicability of the HPSG approach to a wide range of empirical problems, including a number which have occupied center-stage within syntactic theory for well over twenty years: the control of "understood" subjects, long-distance dependencies conventionally treated in terms of wh-movement, and syntactic constraints on the relationship between various kinds of pronouns and their antecedents. The authors make clear how their approach compares with and improves upon approaches undertaken in other frameworks, including in particular the government-binding theory of Noam Chomsky.