Traditionelle Grammatik versus Generative Grammatik

Research paper from 2013 in the field of German Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2.3, University of Cologne, course: Syntax, language: German. Abstract: The question arises as to how a person is capable of forming so many different, increasingly complex sentences and creating new statements without becoming ungrammatical. Do we have every possible sentence in our lexicon? That would exceed our mental lexicon. Therefore, there must be rules that enable us to construct any grammatically correct sentence without having to think about it too much. Both the topological field model and the Government-and-Binding model have dealt with this fact. This paper presents these two models for describing the structure of German sentences. It begins with an examination of the topological field.