01 / Reading Guide
Reading Guide
Who this book is for
For graduate students who want to work within Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar or compare it carefully with another theory. The handbook combines introductory foundations with specialised research chapters. It supports a structured reading route, but its breadth should not obscure the prior analytical skills needed to assess individual proposals.
Prerequisites
Prior syntax, morphology and basic formal semantics are recommended. Comfort with feature structures, logical constraints and linguistic argumentation is important. Read the foundational chapters before using later sections as references.
What it covers
Thirty-two chapters cover formal background, the lexicon and understudied languages, then agreement, case, argument structure, order, dependencies and other syntactic phenomena. Further sections treat morphology, semantics, information structure, processing, computation, dialogue and gesture. Comparisons with Minimalism, Categorial Grammar, LFG, Dependency Grammar and Construction Grammar expose different assumptions instead of treating notational variation as the only difference.
How to use it
Begin with a small set of grammatical and ungrammatical sentences and write the generalisation an analysis must capture. Work through a feature structure, checking where information is shared and which constraint licenses the result. Compare two analyses of the same phenomenon, including predictions for an example not discussed by either. Keep a glossary of formal commitments and use the cross-framework chapters only after understanding those commitments. End with a short argument about empirical coverage and a remaining problem, rather than presenting a complex diagram as an explanation in itself.
Edition and sources
The selected complete second revised edition appeared in November 2024 under CC BY 4.0. The stated ISBN belongs to the PDF; print identifiers are separate. The handbook is a different work from Müller’s broader Grammatical Theory textbook. When following a citation or exercise from the first edition, check chapter organisation and revisions against the chosen edition. Official complete reading route.
