Description:
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title>
<jats:p>Stefan Müller’s recent introductory textbook, “Grammatiktheorie”, is an
astonishingly comprehensive and insightful survey for beginning students of
the present state of syntactic theory. Müller’s inspiring exposition of modern
grammatical reasoning, which takes into account frameworks as diverse
as Categorial Grammar, Tree Adjoining Grammar, Head-driven
Phrase Structure Grammar, Minimalism and Construction Grammar
(among others!), leads us to an exploration of the validity of the popular
claim that grammar theory provides explanations for the human ability to
acquire and use linguistic skills. To what extent this claim is justified seems
unclear in light of the recent wealth of developments in neighboring fields
such as computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, psycholinguistics, and
statistical language modeling. In the first section of the paper, we discuss
what we perceive to be a widening gap between the claims to all-embracing
explanation in theoretical linguistics and the increasingly disturbing neglect
of a vast field of new data and analyses in the above-mentioned related
disciplines. Section 2 gives a condensed survey of the contents of Müller’s
book and discusses the relationships between the various frameworks. We
conclude with sceptical remarks on the book’s preference of breadth over
depth, the legacy of traditional grammar theory, and the future perspective
of linguistics.</jats:p>