Grammatical theory

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Focusing on formal grammar theories, the book delves into various linguistic frameworks such as Phrase Structure Grammar and Transformational Grammar, illustrating their treatment of arguments, adjuncts, and syntactic phenomena using German as a reference. It critically examines the nativism hypothesis and alternative language acquisition models while discussing contentious issues in syntactic theory, including branching structures and the role of abstract entities. The analyses across different frameworks are shown to be intertranslatable, culminating in a discussion of universal language properties.