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.