The volume assembles eleven articles presenting a linguistic approach to the grammar of German, English and the diachronic forerunners of English. Common to all is a theoretical discussion against the background of Chomskyan minimalism (1993) and more recent developments of it (Kayne 1993, Chomsky 1995), all of which make language typology comparisons an interesting proposition. Some of the articles are critical of certain aspects of these theoretical approaches. For all their claims to descriptive universality, it transpires that they fail to address a number of features specific to German.