Journal of Germanic Linguistics 17.1 (2005):1–38
Beers, Kaffi, and Schnaps: Different Grammatical Options for Restaurant Talk Coercions in Three Germanic Languages Heike Wiese Humboldt Universität Berlin Joan Maling Brandeis University This paper discusses constructions such as We’ll have two beers and a coffee that are typically used for beverage orders in restaurant contexts. We compare the behavior of nouns in these constructions in three Germanic languages, English, Icelandic, and German, and take a closer look at the correlation of the morphosyntactic and semantic-conceptual changes involved. We show that even within such a restricted linguistic sample in closely related languages one finds three different grammatical options for the expression of the same conceptual transition. Our findings suggest an analysis of coercion as a genuinely semantic phenomenon, located on a level of semantic representations that serves as an interface between the conceptual and the grammatical systems and takes into account inter- and intralinguistic variations.*
1. Introduction. The term RESTAURANT TALK (RT) refers to constructions that are typically used for beverage orders in restaurant contexts, such as in 1. (1) We’ll have two beers and a coffee. *
Work on this paper was supported by NSF award BCS-0080377 to Boston University. The material is based in part on work done while the second author was serving as Director of the Linguistics Program at the U.S. National Science Foundation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed in this material are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. National Science Foundation. For comments on an earlier version, we would like to thank two anonymous JGL reviewers. © Society of Germanic Linguistics
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An interesting feature of this construction is the unusual behavior of the nouns that identify the beverages. Nouns such as beer and coffee that usually behave like mass nouns, as in She drinks beer/coffee, appear as count nouns in 1. Mass nouns in 1 are marked for number or combined with the indefinite article. This morphosyntactic change goes together with a reference shift from substances (beverages) to portions of substances (servings of beverages), making RT constructions an instance of mass/count coercion; that is, transitions within the mass/count domain leading to a change in interpretation from substances to objects or vice versa.1 In this paper we take a closer look at the correlation of the morphosyntactic and semantic-conceptual changes involved in RT. We compare English RT constructions with similar constructions in two other Germanic languages, Icelandic and German, and show that even within such a restricted linguistic sample involving closely related languages there are at least three different grammatical options for the expression of the same conceptual representation. We provide evidence for interlinguistic as well as intralinguistic variation in the way the grammatical system can reflect the conceptual transition from substances such as beer or coffee to portions of these substances as served in restaurant contexts. We also discuss the implications of these findings for the interface of conceptual and grammatical structures. The first two sections of this paper summarize the conceptual and grammatical background on the constructions under discussion. The first section characterizes the conceptual shift that underlies RT constructions as instances of mass/count coercion, and describes the relevant conceptual distinction of substances and objects. In the second section we discuss the grammatical counterpart of this distinction, demonstrating how the conceptual distinction can be reflected in differences in the morphosyntactic number marking of nouns. On this basis, the third section analyzes the different ways in which the distinction between nonplural (mass) and plural (count) nominals is put to use for mass/count coercion in English, Icelandic, and German RT. In the last section, we bring together our results and discuss them from the broader perspective of linguistic architecture. 1
Generally, the term objects refers to concrete physical objects as well as abstract objects, such as portions or sorts.
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2. Mass/Count Coercion. Coercion occurs when the basic (standard) interpretation of an expression yields an improbable or impossible conceptual representation due to an incompatibility of its constituents.2 For instance, while in the standard interpretation chicken refers to an animal, in a sentence such as There is chicken in the soup the standard interpretation would lead to an improbable representation (one that suggests somehow that there is a whole animal swimming in the soup). In order to avoid such an interpretation, the representation is enriched by concepts associated with this standard interpretation that give rise to a well-formed or more plausible interpretation. In our example, one would enrich the representation such that the sentence is interpreted as There is chicken meat in the soup, rather than a whole animal. This introduction of additional conceptual material has been shown to have an effect in real-time language processing, where evidence from sentence comprehension suggests that an enriched version causes a heavier processing load than one that receives the basic interpretation.3 The examples in 2 illustrate three major kinds of coercion: COMPLEMENT COERCION in 2a, ASPECTUAL COERCION in 2b, and MASS/COUNT COERCION in 2c. (2) a. He finished the book. (complement coercion) Enriched interpretation: ‘He finished reading/writing the book.’ b. The insect hopped until it reached the end of the garden. (aspectual coercion) Enriched interpretation: ‘The insect hopped repeatedly until …’ c. There is chicken in the soup. (mass/count coercion) Enriched interpretation: ‘There is chicken meat in the soup.’ 2
The basic interpretation is the default interpretation of a construction that can be derived from the semantic representations of its constituents directly without enrichment. In some models of semantics this will be the only interpretation that conforms to strict compositionality, while in others enriched interpretations are compositional as well (see Dölling 2001 and Wiese 2003 for a detailed discussion). 3
See McElree et al. 2001 for complement coercions, and Piñango et al. 1999 and Todorova et al. 2000 for aspectual coercions.
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In 2a, an example of complement coercion, the predicate denoted by the verb finish licenses an activity as its argument.4 However, the verb’s complement, the noun phrase the book, denotes an object in its standard interpretation. This incompatibility is fixed by introducing into the interpretation an activity associated with this object such as reading or writing. In 2b, an example of aspectual coercion, the time span denoted by the adverbial phrase until it reached the end of the garden requires an unbounded—durative and non-telic—activity, while the modified predicate identifies a bounded activity, “hopping.” This is consolidated by the introduction of a repetition concept that maps “hopping” onto an unbounded activity (“to hop repeatedly,” “to keep hopping”). Finally, in 2c, an example of mass/count coercion, the locative phrase in the soup suggests an edible substance, while chicken in its standard interpretation identifies an object. In this case, the coercion introduces the concept of a substance that is associated with this object (namely the substance that the edible parts of the object consist of), yielding the concept chicken meat as an enriched interpretation of chicken. There are three main kinds of mass/count coercion, which can be distinguished as GRINDER, SORTER, and PACKER CONSTRUCTIONS. The coercion described in 2 belongs to the class of grinder constructions. In this case the enriched interpretation is based on a conceptual function that maps an object onto the substance constituting the object (or some part of it). For instance, this function maps an animal such as a chicken onto the substance chicken meat. One can think of this mapping function as a “universal grinder” that takes objects as its input and yields continuous masses as its output.5 In a similar vein, two additional “universal machines” have been introduced in the philosophical literature that work the other way around, transforming substances into discrete outputs: a “universal sorter” that yields discrete sorts of substances, and a “universal packer” that yields discrete portions of substances.6 A sorter construction is illustrated in 3a; packer constructions are the ones found in RT, as illustrated in 3b. 4
For a detailed discussion of complement coercions, see Pustejovsky 1991, 1995 and Jackendoff 1997. 5
See Pelletier 1975, and Pelletier and Schubert 1989.
6
See Bunt 1985.
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(3) a. The best wines are from Chile. Enriched interpretation: ‘sorts of wine’
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(sorter construction)
b. Two beers and a coffee, please. (packer construction: RT) Enriched interpretation: ‘portions of beer/coffee’ The unifying feature of mass/count coercion is a conceptual transition between substances and objects. The relevant distinction is defined in 4.7 (4) Conceptual distinction between substances and objects Substances are conceptualized as homogeneous entities whose structure is considered arbitrary.8 Objects are conceptualized as discrete, individual entities (or as consisting of individual entities) whose structure is considered nonarbitrary. Under this notion of substances and objects an example of a substancedenoting nominal is beer in its basic, non-coerced usage, but also chicken in a grinder construction such as 2c above. Examples of object-denoting nominals are a chicken or chickens in non-coerced constructions, as well as nominals in the coerced sorter and packer (= RT) constructions we discussed. In 5 these different usages are brought together. 7
See Prasada 1996, 1999 for a detailed discussion of the status of structure in the conceptual distinction between substances and objects. 8
That is, even though a substance might have an internal structure, the latter does not feature in the representation. Consequently, while for an object such as chicken its internal structure is important (you cannot cut a chicken into two pieces and still have the same animal), for a substance such as chicken meat we do not need to be concerned about internal structure (you can cut a piece of chicken meat into two pieces and still have chicken meat).
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(5) a. She owns {a chicken/chickens}.
(object, no coercion)
b. There is chicken in the soup. (substance, grinder coercion, 2 above) c. She drinks {beer/coffee}.
(substance, no coercion)
d. the best {beers/coffees}.
(object, sorter coercion, 3a above)
e. Two {beers/coffees}, please. (object, packer coercion in RT, 3b above) In sum, on the level of the conceptual representation grinder constructions are based on a transition from objects to substances (for example, edible parts of the object), while sorter and packer constructions reflect a conceptual transition from substances to (abstract) objects. In the case of sorter constructions these objects are sorts of a substance, while in the case of packer constructions they are portions. Figure 1 illustrates the three kinds of conceptual enrichment.
Object (such as animal)
Grinder
Substance substance that the object consists of (such as edible parts)
Sorter Objects sorts of the substance Substance (such as beverage)
Packer
Objects portions of the substance (such as servings of a beverage)
Figure 1. Conceptual enrichment in mass/count coercion.
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The transition from substances to objects itself is a genuinely conceptual phenomenon. The conceptual system provides conceptualizations of objects and substances as well as their associations with concepts of edible parts of these objects or sorts and servings of these substances, respectively. For instance, we have concepts of wine and beer and we know that there are different sorts of wine and beer, and that in restaurants these beverages are served in different portions. Accordingly, the choice of particular conceptualizations for the enriched interpretation can be culture- and context-dependent; for example, three beers can be three servings of 1 pint, 0.3 liters, and 1 liter, etc. The linguistic aspect of coercion concerns the way in which such transition is reflected in the grammatical system. Can expressions undergo a reference shift and receive an enriched conceptual representation as their interpretation, and if so, does this go together with a morphosyntactic change? The following section provides an overview of the morphosyntactic aspect of mass/count distinctions that will serve as a background for our discussion of various grammatical options for RT coercion. 3. The Morphosyntactic Aspect of Mass/Count Distinctions. The morphosyntactic distinction relevant for our discussion concerns the number marking of nominals. In languages that have systematic syntactically driven nominal plural marking (PLURAL LANGUAGES), such as English, Icelandic, and German, the conceptual distinction between substances and objects may be reflected in morphosyntax. A nominal receives plural marking when it refers to objects (for example, beers in three beers), but not when it refers to a substance (for example, beer in She drinks beer). Following Greenberg 1973, we refer to these non-plural instances as TRANSNUMERAL.9 Transnumeral nominals do not undergo pluralization, and do not mark the distinction “one” versus “many” 9
In addition to the term transnumeral, other terms are found in the typological literature. Corbett (2000:9–10) mentions the term transnumeral, but chooses the term general number, describing the phenomenon as follows: “In English, we are usually forced to choose between singular and plural when we use a noun. However, there are languages for which number is less dominant; languages, in which the meaning of the noun can be expressed without reference to number. We shall call this ‘general number’, by which we mean that it is outside the number system.”
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grammatically. Hence, one can think of transnumeral nominals as nominals that transcend number marking. In 6, we summarize the distinction between transnumeral [+tn] and non-transnumeral [-tn] nominals. Note that 6 applies to nominals, that is, to noun phrases rather than nouns. This is because the same noun can often be either a [+tn] or a [-tn] nominal, depending on the context (and correlated with a change in meaning—a central case in point being mass/count coercion). On the lexical level, however, a noun is usually marked for a preference for [+tn] or [-tn] as a default. For instance, a noun such as chicken is first and foremost a count noun and consequently [-tn] by default, while beer is a mass noun and thus [+tn] by default. However, chicken can also appear as a transnumeral nominal, as in There is chicken in the soup, and beer can become a [-tn] nominal, as in We’ll have two beers, please. (6) Grammatical distinction between [± tn] nominals For [+tn] nominals, the distinction “one” versus “many” is not specified: plural marking is not compulsory for reference to more than one entity. 10 10
We describe plural marking as “not compulsory,” rather than as “obligatorily absent” for transnumeral nominals for cross-linguistic reasons. In languages such as English, transnumeral nominals do not receive any plural marking (nor can they be combined with an indefinite article). By contrast, in languages such as Chinese, Persian, or Kurdish, where nouns are transnumeral as a rule, we often find optional number marking for transnumeral nominals. These transnumeral plural (and likewise singular) markers have a different meaning from those of non-transnumeral nouns in languages such as English. They do not indicate the quantity “>1,” but emphasize (non-numerical or numerical) size. Accordingly, they can be attached to substance-denoting nouns as well as to object-denoting ones, as illustrated by Persian examples i and ii. (i) {b / b-h} xord. [substance denoting transnumeral nominal] water/ water-PL ate/drank3SG ‘He/she drank {water/plenty of water}.’ (ii) {mehmn/ mehmn-h} dtm. [object denoting transnumeral nominal] had1PL guest / guest-PL ‘We had {a guest or guests/many, all kinds of guests}.’
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For [-tn] nominals, plural marking is compulsory for reference to more than one instance of the nominal concept. Further, [+tn] and [-tn] nominals behave differently in a number of respects. In particular, [+tn] nominals can occur without plural marking or an article, and occur only in three-term cardinal constructions, that is, in constructions where the numeral is not followed by the noun directly, but first by a numeral classifier (= counting constructions) or a measure noun (= measure constructions). In contrast, [-tn] nominals are marked for number or combined with an article when in argument positions, and can occur in two-term counting constructions, that is, in constructions where the noun can follow the numeral directly (as well as in three-term constructions with measure nouns). The examples in 7 illustrate this point. (7) a. She buys beef.
[+tn: no plural or article]
b. two pounds of {beef/*two beef} [+tn: three-term cardinal construction] c. she buys {a cow/cows/*cow}. d. two cows
[-tn: plural or article]
[-tn: two-term cardinal construction]
Accordingly, beer in our non-coerced example in 5c above is a transnumeral nominal, while beers in the RT example in 5e is nontransnumeral. (8) a. She drinks beer.
[+tn: no plural or article, compare 5c]
b. two liters of beer
[+tn: three-term cardinal construction]
c. She orders {a beer/beers}. d. two beers
[-tn: plural or article]
[-tn: two-term cardinal construction, compare 5e]
Cross-linguistically, the following generalization holds: nominals that denote substances usually behave as [+tn], whereas nominals that denote objects usually behave as [-tn] (and consequently receive systematic See Hincha 1961 and Windfuhr 1979 for a discussion of Persian number marking, and Wiese 1997b for a semantic account of transnumeral and nontransnumeral number markers.
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plural marking). In plural languages this gives rise to the bidirectional default correlation between morphosyntactic and conceptual features stated in 9. (9) Default correlation between morphosyntactic and conceptual features In languages with systematic, syntactically driven nominal plural marking (plural languages), the default correlation between morphosyntactic and conceptual features is: transnumeral substance. Hence, in plural languages, transnumeral nominals usually refer to substances, such as beef, while [-tn] nominals (which we label PLURAL NOMINALS, that is, nominals that systematically pluralize) usually refer to objects, such as a cow/cows. In first language acquisition this correlation supports the interpretation of novel words and can lead to overgeneralizations for nominals that deviate from the default.11 Such deviations are realized by nominals that refer to objects, such as cattle or furniture, but behave as transnumerals morphosyntactically. They are neither marked for plural, nor combined with an indefinite article. Further, they occur in three-term cardinal constructions, where a numeral classifier, such as head or piece stands between numeral and noun. This is illustrated in 10. (10) a. She bought {cattle/furniture}.
[+ tn: no plural or article]
b. six {head of cattle/pieces of furniture} [+tn: three-term cardinal construction] Note that the constructions in 10b are counting constructions in contrast to the measure construction in 7b above. The latter specifies the weight of beef, whereas the former specifies number; that is, it specifies the cardinality of a set consisting of individual instances of the nominal concepts cattle or furniture (for example, individual cows, or individual tables, chairs, etc.). Hence, although cattle and furniture in 10b are transnumeral nominals just as beef is in 7b, they do occur in counting 11
See Brown 1957 and Bloom 1994, 2000 for data from English.
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constructions because, unlike beef, the nominals cattle and furniture refer to objects, and not to substances.12 In contrast to plural nominals, such as cows in six cows, transnumeral nominals such as cattle and furniture are not marked for plural in counting constructions. Instead, they are combined with numeral classifiers, such as head or piece, as shown in 10b. Semantically, such classifiers contribute an individuation function, that is, a semantic function that provides access to individual elements (for example, individual animals in the case of cattle) and thus prepares the number assignment.13 Numeral classifiers are typically nouns that, when used as classifiers, lose most of their lexical content in favor of their semantic function as an individuator: head in 10b does not refer to any particular head, but rather is used to provide access to individual animals. Likewise, the pieces of furniture in 10b are not really pieces, but rather whole tables, chairs, etc. Syntactically, this reduction in lexical content is reflected in the fact that, as classifiers, these nouns do not expand to a whole NP: they may not be modified, and are often not marked for number.14 Unlike transnumeral nominals, plural nominals occur in two-term counting constructions without a numeral classifier (as in six cows). In this case, the role of the numeral classifier is performed by the nominal number marker. Individuation is part of the quantification that plural markers carry out, and it is the prerequisite for marking the size of a set as “more than one” (for example, the plural marker in dogs indicates that we have a set of individual dogs that has more than one element). Syntactically, counting constructions can be viewed as quantifier phrases (QPs) with a numeral head that requires the feature individuation in its complement. This feature can be supplied by a plural noun or a numeral classifier. While the plural noun is part of the complement, numeral classifiers can be analyzed as non-expanding nominal head adjuncts (that is, N0-adjuncts to Q0). This accounts for central cross12
Wiese and Piñango 2001 present evidence for the distinction of substanceversus object-denoting nominals within the [+tn] class in language processing. 13
See Krifka 1995, Eschenbach 1993, and Wiese 1997a for a discussion of individuation functions in the semantic representation of cardinal constructions. 14
However, as the example of pieces in 10b shows, in plural languages such as English, classifiers can undergo pluralization.
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linguistic characteristics of classifier constructions. First, cardinals and numeral classifiers are adjacent. Second, as mentioned above, classifiers have a nominal source, but do not show the behavior of full NPs. Third, numerals and classifiers together select their NP complements. Figure 2 provides an illustration with syntactic representations for the two-term construction six cows, which has a plural NP complement, and the classifier construction six head of cattle, which has a transnumeral NP as part of the complement. (a)
(b) QP ind
Q0 two
QPind Q 0ind
NPplural/ind cows Q0 two
PP N 0ind head
P0 of
NPtransnum. cattle
Figure 2. Counting construction: Plural noun (a) versus classifier and transnumeral noun (b). In plural languages, classifier constructions are the less common instance of counting constructions, since transnumeral nouns that refer to objects such as cattle or furniture are rare and constitute a deviation from the default correlation transnumeral substance. However, from a broader perspective, such nouns are very common since many languages of the world are transnumeral, where nominals are generally [+tn]. Accordingly, counting constructions with numeral classifiers are the rule rather than an exception.15 Examples 11 and 12 contain data from two languages as diverse as Chinese and Kurdish. 15
There exists a small class of nominals that may show a tendency toward [-tn] behavior in overall transnumeral languages. In particular, nominals that occupy a high position on the animacy hierarchy (that is, pronouns and nouns referring to humans and some animals) are often systematically marked for plural when referring to more than one entity (Smith-Stark 1974, Corbett 2000).
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(11) Chinese a. Wo xiang chi pingguo I want eat apple ‘I want to eat {an apple/apples}.
[no plural or article]
b. san ge pingguo [counting constuction with the classifer ge] three piece apple ‘three apples’ (12) Kurdish (Sorãni)16 a. sew-m kr apple-1.SG.ERG bought ‘I bought {an apple/apples}.’
[no plural or article]
b. s t sew [counting construction with the classifier t] three piece apple ‘three apples’ Unlike measure nouns, such as pounds in six pounds of beef discussed above, classifier expressions can be optional; that is, they need not be overt in some languages. This is the case in Kurdish, for instance, and also in some dialects of English (we return to constructions with implicit classifiers in our discussion of German RT below). (13) a. s (t) sew [+tn] [counting construction with the optional classifier t] b. six (head of) cattle [+tn] [counting construction with the optional classifier head] Note that the difference between constructions with plural and transnumeral nominals is not a difference between constructions with and without agreement between numeral and plural noun. Rather, we are dealing with a distinction between nominals that mark number distinctions and those that do not. In particular, there is no plural marking on numerals on the morphosyntactic level. Morphosyntactically, a 16
For discussion of the Kurdish data we would like to thank Sarkaut Zandi, Diler Assad, and Adel Zhia.
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numeral such as three is not marked for number (unlike threes in They came in twos and threes). Therefore, there can be no agreement of the numeral with the plural nominal in a construction such as the English three apples. It is only on the semantic level that numerals “>1” contribute “manyness”, and on this level it would not make any sense for the nominal to agree: why would we need to contribute the same information twice (namely, that we are talking about a set of more than one element)? The sole reason for a plural nominal here is the need for the individuation that number markers in [-tn] nominals contribute. Likewise, counting constructions with transnumeral nominals are not “non-agreement” constructions. Transnumeral nominals such as the Chinese pingguo or the Kurdish sew ‘apple’ or the English furniture are marked neither for singular nor for plural.17 Rather, they transcend number distinctions in the sense that the distinction between “one” and “many” is not morphosyntactically marked. In order to appear in an argument position, these nominals do not need to specify morphosyntactically whether they refer to one or to many entities.18 This makes the distinction between transnumeral and plural nominals an instance of the general rule that although it is possible in principle to express everything in every language, different languages have different requirements as to what one has to express. For instance, in English uncle refers to the brother (or brother-in-law) of either of one’s parents, whereas in Kurdish it is necessary to specify whether the person in question is the mother’s brother (in which case he is called xlo) or the 17
Singular marking in Kurdish is realized morphosyntactically as a suffix, whereas its English counterpart is a lexical “singular element,” namely, the indefinite article. 18
Since transnumeral nominals transcend number marking (as opposed to being marked for plural or singular), there is variation as to whether they are combined with plural or singular verbs. In transnumeral languages that have number distinctions on verbs, such as Kurdish and Persian, the choice of plural or singular verbs for transnumeral subjects can depend on such features as animacy or respect. In English, we find different options depending on the noun. For example, furniture is combined with singular verbs, as in The furniture has been sold. In contrast, cattle goes mostly with plural verbs, as in The cattle have been sold, although in some dialects it can also be combined with singular verbs. In counting constructions with numerals “>1,” there are plural verb forms triggered by semantic “manyness.”
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father’s (in which case he is called mma). Similarly, in buying certain kind of fruits, say apples, English forces a specification of whether one is involved (I bought an apple) or more than one (I bought apples). By contrast, Kurdish does not force such a specification (that is, sew can mean either ‘an apple’ or ‘apples’).19 4. Restaurant Talk in English, Icelandic, and German. How is the morphosyntactic distinction of transnumeral and plural nominals put to use for mass/count coercion in plural languages and, in particular, for RT? This section discusses RT constructions in English, Icelandic, and German, three Germanic languages that, as we show, have at least three different options for the grammatical integration of packer transitions with often more than one option realized in the same language. In their basic interpretation, the nominals that denote beverages (for example, coffee, wine, beer, etc., which we refer to as BEVERAGE NOMINALS) refer to substances and behave as transnumeral; that is, they are not pluralized and can occur as bare NPs. When such nouns occur in RT constructions, we find inter- as well as intralinguistic variation with respect to the following questions. (14) a. Do the beverage nominals involved in RT allow a reference shift from substance to portion of a substance (such that they can receive an enriched interpretation in RT constructions)? b. If so, is their reference shift reflected by a morphosyntactic shift from [+tn] to [-tn] behavior (such that pluralization of the beverage nominal marks reference to portions in RT constructions)? 4.1. English: Coffees and Beers. In English, the answer to both of these questions is definitely “yes.” In RT coercion, beverage nominals undergo a reference shift and refer to 19
In plural languages such as English, where transnumeral nominals have only a marginal status, they are often superordinate terms and carry the pragmatic implication that they refer to a non-singleton set. Although in principle transnumeral nominals such as furniture can refer to one sofa/table/chair etc., as well as to many pieces of furniture, in a sentence such as Karen bought furniture the default interpretation is that she bought more than one piece.
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portions of substances, and the reference shift is accompanied by a shift in morphosyntax from [+tn] to [-tn]. In their basic occurrence, as illustrated in 15a below, the beverage nominals refer to substances and show transnumeral behavior: they occur without an article and plural marking. In RT contexts such as 15b beverage nominals refer to portions of the substances (abstract objects) and show [-tn] behavior: they are combined with an indefinite article or marked for plural. (15) a. She drinks {beer/wine/coffee}. non-RT: substances denoted by [+tn] nominals (= non-plural) b. A beer, three wines, and two coffees, please. RT: portions of substances denoted by [-tn] nominals (= plural) In English, then, beverage nominals undergo both a conceptual shift and a morphosyntactic shift. The two shifts go hand-in-hand based on the default transnumeral substance. Accordingly, the semantic contribution of the constituents in a simple English RT construction such as two coffees can be characterized as follows: while the numeral two contributes the cardinality, the plural beverage nominal coffees receives an enriched interpretation that identifies the complex concept portions of coffee; that is, it denotes the result of applying the “packer” in Figure 1 above to the substance coffee. This distribution is summarized in 16 (the constituents are identified by subscripts, their semantic contribution by expressions in small caps).20 (16) two coffees:
[TWOnumeral [PORTIONS(COFFEE)]plural nominal]
From a syntactic point of view, an RT construction such as two coffees constitutes a standard plural counting construction, with a plural complement (coffees) that contributes the individuation aspect required by the numeral. This is illustrated in figure 3. 20
This is an informal summary that serves as a basis for our comparison of English RT constructions with their Icelandic and German counterparts. A general discussion of formal semantic representations for RT constructions is given in Wiese 1997a.
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17
QPind Q0
NPplural/ind
two
coffees
Figure 3. English RT: Counting construction with plural nominal. 4.2. Excursus: Could Coercion Be a Purely Syntactic Phenomenon? As evident from our analysis of constructions such as two coffees, we follow standard approaches found in the semantic literature in regarding coercion as a phenomenon characterized by an enrichment of the semantic representation.21 Is this the only way to look at it, or could coercion also be captured by syntactic derivations alone? In other words, could the phenomenon of coercion be given a purely syntactic account? In this excursus, we briefly state the reasons why we do not think such a “syntax only” approach can work. In order to account for coercion as a purely syntactic phenomenon, one would have to assume a phonologically empty element as part of the syntactic derivation in order to obtain the correct meaning. This element would have to contribute the portion aspect required for the meaning of the construction. One can think of such a phonologically empty element as something along the lines of the “silent nouns” suggested in Kayne 2003a,b.22 However, while the meaning of portion is clearly present in the semantic representation of an RT construction such as two coffees, there is no syntactic evidence for the presence of a corresponding silent element in syntax. It could be expected that a silent noun portion in the syntactic tree would be reflected, for instance, in gender marking of the numeral or of the determiner in languages that have gender agreement. If an element is part of the syntactic representation and only phonologically 21 22
See Pustejovsky 1995 and Jackendoff 1997.
For example, Kayne (2003a,b) proposes that constructions such as few NUMBER books or a red COLOR car (where capital letters indicate nonpronunciation) contain silent nouns such as NUMBER or COLOR.
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empty, then it should take part in such syntactic phenomena as agreement.23 Moreover, if there is no conceptual enrichment for beverage nominals, but instead a silent noun contributes the portion aspect, we have to account for the pluralization of the beverage nominal somehow. This could be done by a syntactic representation where portions is merged as -s [portion]. Under this interpretation, two coffees would be represented as in 17. (17) two [-s [portion] coffee] Since the plural marker -s is a suffix, and as such must be attached to the beverage noun coffee, coffee would then have to raise to the left of -s, while portion is PF deleted.24 However, this kind of raising analysis would lead to wrong morphological marking in a number of cases. For example, in a language such as German the plural suffix of one noun cannot be combined with another noun freely without running into morphological clashes. Another point that speaks against such a raising analysis is the fact that we can have constructions such as two black coffees, where the beverage nominal is preceded by an adjective that modifies the beverage. If there was the silent noun portion in the syntactic representation, it should come before black; that is, black would be between portion and coffee, as in 18. (18) two [-s [portion] black coffee] Raising of coffee to the left of -s would then lead to two coffees black; that is, an incorrect word order. In addition, quantifiers that modify the portion aspect can occur in the position immediately before adjectives, 23
Below we discuss a different kind of construction where this kind of morphosyntactic evidence can be found, namely, RT constructions with transnumeral beverage nominals in Icelandic. We show that in these constructions gender marking on the numeral supports an analysis that involves phonologically empty nouns on the syntactic level (albeit empty container nouns, rather than the general silent noun portion). 24
This syntactic analysis was suggested by one of the JGL reviewers.
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such as black in two small black coffees. In this case, portion would appear between small and black before PF deletion, as shown in 19, and raising of coffee would lead to two small coffees black. (19) two [small [-s [portion]] black coffee] By contrast, having the meaning of “portion” included in the semantic representation of coffee, but not in the syntactic representation of the construction, does not pose any special combinatorial problems. Nouns with complex semantic representations can often be combined with modifiers that apply to only a part of the nominal semantic representation. For instance, in the default interpretation of good dancer the modifier good applies only to the semantic representation of the verbal stem dance, not to that of the whole noun (a good dancer is someone who dances well, not a good person who dances).25 Taken together, we interpret this as evidence that portion appears only in the semantic, but not in the syntactic representation. In other words, there is no silent noun portion in syntax. The notion of portion is not introduced via a syntactic representation where it contributes its semantics before being deleted at PF; rather, it is introduced only on the semantic level via conceptual enrichment of a representation that otherwise would lead to a clash in the interpretation. 4.3. Icelandic: Kaffi and Bjórar. Most Icelandic beverage nominals do not undergo a syntactic change in RT, rather they remain transnumeral; that is, they do not receive number marking.26 They are usually combined with container nouns, as illustrated in 20 below, which means that there is also no reference shift involved. Since the notion of portion is explicitly expressed by a 25
See Egg 2004 for a recent discussion of such cases and a proposal for the derivation of their semantic representations. 26 For discussion of the Icelandic data we would like to thank Anna Sigurardóttir, Berglaug Skúladóttir, Gumundur Ásgeirsson, Halldór Ármann Sigursson, Helgi Skúli Kjartansson, Jóhanna Bardal, Kjartan Ottósson, Magnús Björnsson, Margrét Jónsdóttir, Nanna Reykdal, and Sigríur Magnúsdóttir, and members of the audience at the Linguistics Discussion Group at the University of Iceland where the second author presented some of this material on September 17, 2004.
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container noun, the beverage nominals receive their basic substance interpretation rather than an enriched interpretation as in English. (20) a. Hún drekkur {kaffi/bjór}. she drinks coffee/beer ‘She drinks {coffee/beer}.’ non-RT: substances denoted by [+tn] nominals (no pluralization) b. Tvo {bolla af kaffi / kaffi-bolla}. twoMASC. cupsMASC. of coffeeNEUT. / coffeeNEUT.-cups MASC. ‘Two cups of coffee, please.’ RT: substance denoted by [+tn] nominal, portion denoted by container noun Note that in Icelandic a compound such as kaffibolla ‘coffee cups’ can also be used here. In contrast to English and German, the construction with a compound is ambiguous; that is, tvo kaffibolla in 20b can mean ‘two cups of coffee’ as well as ‘two coffee cups’. Hence we have two kinds of constructions with explicit container nouns in Icelandic. In both cases, the nominal complement has a plural head, the container noun. Accordingly, in 20b the numeral agrees in gender with this container noun bolla, not with the beverage noun kaffi. Being plural, the container noun provides the individuation required for the QP. The transnumeral beverage noun is embedded morphologically in compound constructions (where the container noun acts as its morphological head), and syntactically in constructions where the container noun acts as its syntactic head, as shown in figure 4. (a)
(b) QPind
Q0 tvo
QPind
NPplural/ind Q0 kaffitransnumeral-bollaplural/ind tvo
NPplural/ind N0plural/ind bolla
PP[NPtransnum.] af kaffi
Figure 4. Icelandic RT with explicit container nouns that embed beverage nominals (a) morphologically or (b) syntactically.
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21
In addition to this explicit kind of RT construction, Icelandic has two kinds of constructions without container nouns. The first kind is similar to English RT, with a plural beverage noun that receives an enriched portion interpretation. As in English, this coerced nominal does not have a container noun as its head, but is combined with the numeral or determiner directly. Accordingly, in this kind of Icelandic RT construction, there is gender agreement between the determiner or numeral (for numerals up to four) and the beverage noun:27 (21)
tvo bjóra twoMASC beersMASC ‘two beers’ RT: portions of the substances denoted by [-tn] nominal
However, this construction is restricted to a few nouns. In general, Icelandic RT constructions without an explicit container noun are characterized by transnumeral beverage nouns, that is, nouns that do not receive plural marking, although they are not embedded under an explicit container noun. Compared to the explicit construction in 20b, this third kind of construction is somewhat marginal, and speakers’ intuitions regarding the acceptability of particular examples may differ. In general, nouns seem likely to occur in these constructions if they do not have a straightforward plural form (unlike bjór ‘beer’) and denote beverages that are often ordered in standard portions in restaurants, bars, or liquor stores.28 In addition, there seems to be some dialectal variation, although the exact distribution patterns for this construction must remain beyond the scope of this paper (for example, 22b below seems to be more acceptable for speakers from the north). What is important for our discussion here is that, as we show below, this third kind of Icelandic RT construction is elliptical; that is, it contains a phonologically empty 27
Note that bjóra is accusative, as are the beverage nouns in 20 above, because in Icelandic (and similarly, in German, see 25 below), orders are given in the accusative case even if subject and verb are omitted. 28 In addition, a list effect for the occurrence of container noun ellipsis in Icelandic restaurant talk can be observed, as suggested by Helgi Skúli Kjartansson, personal communication with J. Maling, November 21, 2003. Gender agreement with an implicit container noun is more likely in a list, especially if the genders of the beverage nouns in this list differ.
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container noun. This means that unlike those in English, the beverage nouns in Icelandic do not undergo a reference shift, since the portion concept is contributed by the implicit container noun, just as in the type of explicit container constructions illustrated in 20b above. The presence of such an empty container noun is indicated by agreement relations within the noun phrase. In contrast to plural RT constructions (see 21), the determiner or numeral in these constructions agrees in gender with the empty container noun, not with the overt beverage noun.29 As the contrast between 22c and 22d illustrates, this can even support the distinction between different empty container nouns. (22) a. Get ég fengi annan kaffi? may I have anotherMASC coffeeNEUT ‘Could I have another coffee?’ [container noun: bolli ‘cup’, masculine] 29
Constructions with masculine numerals seem to be more common, probably because masculine gender for numerals appears also in other bare constructions without a (explicit) head noun, which might support the acceptability of elliptical RT constructions with masculine numerals. These constructions include, in particular, numerals used in rote counting (“one, two, three, …”), but also numerals in—mostly idiomatic—constructions that refer to abstract entities, as in i and ii below (we thank Helgi Skúli Kjartansson for pointing out these constructions to us). Note, however, that similar constructions with masculine numerals exist in German, as shown in i' and ii'' below, which does not have container noun ellipsis in RT. This suggests that such elliptical RT constructions in Icelandic are an independent phenomenon (although the existence of constructions such as i and ii might lead to a higher acceptability of elliptical RT with masculine numerals in Icelandic): (i) Á ég a-gefa ér einn should I give you oneMASC ‘Do you want a punch in the face?’ (ii) a fá sér einn to get oneself oneMASC ‘to slug one down’
gráan gray MASC
á to
hann? it (the jaw)
Restaurant Talk Coercions
b. einn mjólk30 aMASC milkFEM ‘a milk’
23
[container noun: bolli ‘cup’, masculine]
c. tvo viskí (used for orders in a bar) twoMASC whiskey NEUT ‘two whiskeys’ [container noun: sjússar ‘drinks’, masculine] d. tvær {viskí / Fanta} (used for orders in a liquor store) twoFEM whiskey NEUT/FantaNEUT ‘two {whiskeys/Fantas}’ [container noun: flöskur ‘bottles’, feminine] The agreement with an empty container noun distinguishes these RT constructions from sorter constructions in Icelandic. In sorter constructions, we also find a numeral followed by a beverage noun, but in this case the determiner agrees with the beverage noun, suggesting a reference shift of the beverage noun whose interpretation is enriched by a sorts concept. Compare, for example, the RT construction in 22a above with its sorter counterpart in 23. (i')
Willst du einen auf-s Maul? Want you oneMASC on-the mouth ‘Do you want a punch in the face?’
(ii'') einen {trinken/saufen} oneMASC, ACC drink / drink ‘to {have a drink/slug one down }’ 30
This example is from Kress (1982:186, note 2), who comments: “Bei Bestellungen in Restaurants bleibt das Genus unberücksichtigt.” (“Grammatical gender is disregarded in restaurant orders” [translation, HW/JL].) In view of 22c and the contrast between 22c and 22d, this seems to be too general. Although there can be gender agreement in this kind of Icelandic RT, it is not with the beverage nominal itself, but with its head, the implicit container noun. Note that, as mentioned above, not all speakers can use the masculine form of the numeral as in Kress’s example. Some speakers accept only eina mjólk with feminine numeral, while others, especially those from the north of Iceland, accept einn mjólk. The masculine numeral may be default masculine, as discussed in note 29 above, since milk would normally be served in a glass (denoted by a neuter noun in Icelandic) or a carton (denoted by a feminine noun). No speakers accept the neuter numeral eitt with mjólk, or even with the neuter noun vatn ‘water’.
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(23) Get ég fengi anna kaffi? may I have anotherNE U T . coffeeN E UT . ‘Could I have another (kind of) coffee?’
[sorter construction]
Hence in the Icelandic RT constructions in 22, beverage nominals are combined with an empty container noun. The agreement relations discussed above indicate the presence of such a container noun in the grammatical representation, and since container nouns contribute portion concepts, beverage nouns in these constructions, unlike those in English, do not receive an enriched interpretation. Also, unlike their English counterparts, they undergo neither a reference shift nor a morphosyntactic change, but remain substance denoting and transnumeral. Our findings with respect to tvo kaffi(-bolla)/(bolla af) kaffi ‘two (cups of) coffee’ are summarized in 24, parallel to the sketch of semantic contributions of English RT we provided in 16 above (subscripts in brackets indicate optionally elliptical constituents). (24) tvo kaffi: [TWOnumeral [PORTIONS(container noun) [COFFEEtransnumeral nominal]]] Given the lack of oblique case marking on the beverage nominal, we believe that elliptical phrases (for example, tvo kaffi) are derived from constructions such as tvo (bolla) kaffi, where kaffi stands in apposition to the numeral plus container noun.31 Such constructions without a preposition occur, for instance, in shopping lists. 4.4. German: Bier, Schnaps, and Schnäpse. German has two kinds of RT constructions. One has the same structure as English RT constructions, with plural beverage nominals as in 25a, while the other kind of construction involves transnumeral beverage nominals that do not get number marking, as in 25b. 31
Note that the beverage nominal receives dative case from the preposition af in constructions such as tvo bolla af kaffi or tvær flöskur af víni, while in Icelandic compounds similar to tvo kaffibolla the first element can either be a bare stem (vínglas) assigned genitive case (rauvínsglas, mjólkurglas), or contain a linking element (see Indriason 1999).
Restaurant Talk Coercions
(25) a. Zwei two
Martinis, martinis
bitte. please
25
[plural beverage nominal]
b. Zwei Kaffee, vier Bier und drei Wein, bitte. two coffee four beer and three wine please ‘Two coffees, four beers, and three wines, please.’ [transnumeral beverage nominal] Note that the nominals in 25b are not marked for plural, explicitly or implicitly (by phonologically empty plural marking). Given that some nouns in German have identical forms for the nominative and the accusative singular and plural (for instance, the plural of Sänger ‘singer’ is Sänger ‘singers’), one might argue that the beverage nominals in 25b are not transnumeral but rather plural nouns with implicit phonologically empty plural allomorphs. Such an interpretation would make this construction comparable to the one in 25a and to those in English RT, and thus of rather less interest for our discussion. However, sorter constructions such as the one in 26 show that this is not the case, since Kaffee, Bier, and Wein do occur in their plural form with an explicit plural suffix, not a zero suffix. (26) Hier gibt es die besten {Kaffees/Biere/Weine}. here gives it the best coffees/beers/wines ‘In this place, they have the best {coffees/beers/wines}.’ [sorter construction] This means that the beverage nominals in 25b are indeed transnumeral; they occur in their non-plural forms unlike the ones in 25a and 26. Thus, in German the transnumeral versus plural behavior of nominals such as Kaffee, Bier, or Wein in mass/count coercion can distinguish between constructions with a sorter interpretation (26) and RT constructions with a packer interpretation (25b). While beverage nominals in German sorter constructions are always plural, in RT contexts the construction with transnumeral beverage nominals seems to represent the default case. In contrast, constructions with plural beverage nominals such as 25a are marginal, being possible with only a few nouns. Some nouns can occur in both kinds of constructions, as is the case for Schnaps in 27.
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(27) Zwei {Schnaps / Schnäpse}, bitte. ([±tn] beverage nominal) two schnappsSG. / schnappsPL. please ‘Two schnapps, please.’ In contrast to Icelandic RT constructions with transnumeral nominals, in German RT the determiner agrees in gender with the overt beverage noun, not with a possible empty container noun, as shown in 28. (28) a. Einen Kaffee, ein Bier und eine Milch, bitte. a MASC. coffeeMASC. aNEUT. beerNEUT. and aFEM. milkFEM. please ‘A coffee, a beer, and a milk, please.’ b. Eine Tasse Kaffee, eine aFEM. cupFEM. coffeeMASC. aFEM. und einen and aMASC.
Becher mugMASC.
Flasche Bier bottleFEM. beerNEUT
Milch. milkFEM
‘A cup of coffee, a bottle of beer, and a {mug/cup} of milk.’ This fact speaks against an analysis of these constructions as elliptical in German, since unlike Icelandic German does not have container noun ellipsis in RT. The beverage nominals are combined with a determiner or a numeral directly, without the interference of a container noun. In these constructions, then, the beverage nominals themselves, albeit transnumeral, encompass the packer aspect. They receive an enriched interpretation and denote portions of the substance in question. This analysis implies that German RT deviates from the standard correlation transnumeral substance (since we have transnumeral, non-plural, nominals with object-reference). As we have shown above, such a deviation is not uncommon. It is an option not only realized in transnumeral languages such as Chinese and Kurdish, but also through lexical items such as cattle or furniture in plural languages such as English, German, and Icelandic. Just as these nouns, beverage nominals in German RT are object-denoting expressions, even though they remain transnumeral rather than become pluralized. Further support for this analysis comes from constructions such as the one exemplified in 29, where an optional numeral classifier (CL) occurs with the transnumeral beverage noun.
Restaurant Talk Coercions
(29) Zwei (Glas) Wein, bitte. two glassCL wine please ‘Two wines, please.’
27
[RT: classifier Glas]
The fact that Glas is not marked for number indicates that it is used as a numeral classifier in 29, and not as a container noun. Although it is characteristic of classifiers to be combined with numerals in their bare form, container nouns require plural marking in German (as well as in other plural languages such as English or Icelandic).32 Accordingly, in a construction such as 30, where Glas is used as a container noun, the plural form Gläser is found. (30) zwei Gläser Wein two glasses wine ‘two glasses of wine’
[container noun Gläser]
Taken together, this suggests that German RT constructions with transnumeral nominals involve an implicit—optionally overt—numeral classifier, similar to RT constructions in transnumeral languages such as Kurdish, where classifiers are optional in general (see also our discussion of optional classifiers above). (31) Du (t) i-mn b bna. [RT: optional classifier] two [CL] tea-us for bring ‘Bring two teas for us, please/Two teas, please.’ These data support an analysis of German RT constructions such as zwei Wein as counting constructions with an implicit classifier and a transnumeral nominal complement. Hence, the beverage nominals in German RT constructions can remain transnumeral (and do so by default), but they still undergo a reference shift from substance to portions of a substance. Unlike plural nominals—and like all transnumeral nominals—they are not individuated in their semantic representation, but rather the individuation is contributed by a numeral classifier (implicit or explicit). In 32, we summarize the semantic 32
This is a general characteristic of numeral classifiers; see our discussion above and the English, Chinese, and Kurdish classifiers in 10b, 11b, and 12b, respectively.
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contribution of the constituents in German RT for our example two coffees (German zwei Kaffee). (32) zwei Kaffee: [TWOnumeral [INDIVIDUATION](CL) [PORTION(COFFEE)]transnumeral nominal] The syntactic representations for such constructions with explicit and implicit classifiers are outlined in figure 5. (a)
(b) QPind Q 0ind
Q0 zwei
QPind NPtransnumeral
N0ind Glas
Q0ind zwei
NPtransnumeral Wein
Wein
Figure 5. German RT with (a) explicit and (b) implicit numeral classifier. Note that by “implicit classifier” we do not mean that there is a specific covert classifier such as Glas or Tasse in the syntactic representation. Rather, in German RT (as in similar constructions in other languages with implicit classifiers such as in the Kurdish example 31) the individuation contributed by a classifier is added to the representation implicitly. Syntactically, the individuation requirement is satisfied within the QP head, while semantically it is bound by existential quantification. The availability of such constructions in German RT is supported by the existence of constructions such as the one exemplified in 33, where a propositional classifier Mal (whose approximate meaning is ‘time’) is employed for meal orders in restaurants. (33) Zwei Mal den kleinen Salat, Two timesCL the small salad ‘Two small salads, please.’
bitte. please
Restaurant Talk Coercions
29
While these constructions are similar to RT constructions such as 32 in that they also involve a classifier (albeit one for propositions, not for portions), they are not structurally identical to them. The differentiation becomes evident, for instance, in the fact that constructions with Mal typically involve a definite article as in 33 (den kleinen Salat), whereas this is not possible in RT, as shown in 34. (34) *Zwei Ø {das Bier/den Wein}, two the beer/the wine
bitte. please
Consequently, constructions such as the one in 32 cannot be analyzed as being similar to the one in 33, but with the element Mal being deleted at PF. Rather, they constitute a separate category of RT constructions. 4.5. A Note on Restaurant Talk versus Sorter Constructions. Note that in both Icelandic and German there is a difference between RT constructions and constructions with sorter interpretation. While we found RT constructions with transnumeral beverage nominals (in addition to plural constructions), no such option was available for sorter constructions. In sorter constructions, beverage nominals are marked for plural in German, and agree in gender with the determiner in Icelandic. Accordingly, we found minimal pairs such as those in 35 and 36. (35) German a. zwei two
Bier beer
b. zwei two
Biere beers
[transnumeral beverage nominal: portion interpretation, RT] [plural beverage nominal: sorts interpretation]
(36) Icelandic a. annan kaffi [transnumeral beverage nominal, no gender anotherMASC. coffeeNEUT. agreement: portion interpretation, RT] b. anna kaffi anotherNEUT. coffeeNEUT.
[gender agreement: sorts interpretation]
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Examples 35 and 36 suggest that sorter coercions are always morphologically marked, while RT constructions can remain unmarked. At present we cannot tell whether this pattern holds only for the languages we investigated or reflects a general cross-linguistic tendency in plural languages. However, we believe the latter to be the case in view of the linguistic and extralinguistic context of RT constructions. RT constructions occur in specialized contexts, namely as part of restaurant orders where the beverage nominal is usually combined with a numeral. This context is strong enough to support the portion interpretation for the construction even in the absence of morphological marking. By contrast, sorter constructions are much freer in their distribution, and their occurrence is not bound to particular contexts. This means that in the absence of an explicit noun such as sorts (parallel to an explicit container noun in RT), one needs to indicate that a sortal interpretation is intended. Given the default correlation transnumeral substance for conceptual and grammatical distinctions in plural languages, a straightforward way to do this in languages such as English, Icelandic, and German is to mark the beverage nominal for number. Plural marking—or, in singular constructions as in Icelandic, agreement with the determiner—then indicates reference to objects (in this case, sorts of a substance), rather than to substances. Consequently, there is a strong motivation to morphologically mark sorter coercions, while for RT portion interpretations constructions without such a marking are possible as well. If this account is correct, one would expect a tendency in transnumeral languages to avoid sorter coercions and to favor instead explicit constructions with a noun meaning ‘sort’, since these languages cannot make use of the default transnumeral substance found in plural languages and hence cannot indicate reference to objects (= sorts of a substance) via plural marking. RT constructions, on the other hand, should be unproblematic since here the context is sufficient to indicate reference to portions. 5. Conclusion. Our discussion has shown that RT in English, Icelandic, and German makes use of three different grammatical options for the same underlying conceptual structures, and that variation occurs not only between languages, but also within languages.
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Option 1: Reference shift accompanied by morphosyntactic change. This is the option most significantly realized in English RT. It is also available in German and Icelandic, but here the construction has only a marginal status in RT, where it is restricted to a few nouns (while it is dominant for sorter constructions). In this kind of construction, beverage nominals undergo a reference shift from substance to objects; that is, they receive an enriched interpretation and refer to portions of a beverage. This shift is accompanied by a morphosyntactic change in accordance with the default correlation of conceptual and grammatical distinctions in plural languages. When they denote substances, beverage nominals are transnumeral (that is, they do not receive number marking), and when they denote portions of these substances in RT constructions they undergo pluralization and are semantically individuated. Option 2: No reference shift, and no morphosyntactic change. This option does not involve coercion and exists in all three languages. However, in Icelandic it may give rise to RT constructions with a numeral immediately followed by a beverage nominal. In this kind of construction, beverage nominals do not undergo a reference shift, but remain substance denoting. Accordingly, they also do not change their syntactic behavior and remain transnumeral, so no pluralization occurs. The packer concepts that map the substances in question onto their portions are contributed by container nouns. These container nouns can be phonologically empty in Icelandic, leading to two term RT constructions. Option 3: Reference shift, but no morphosyntactic change. This is the dominant option in German RT. In this construction, beverage nominals undergo a reference shift. As in Option 1 (and unlike in Option 2) they receive an enriched interpretation and refer to portions of a beverage. However, in contrast to Option 1 the nominals remain transnumeral and semantically non-individuated. Implicit or explicit numeral classifiers contribute the individuation that is necessary for counting constructions. Table 1 summarizes the correlation of morphosyntactic and conceptual features in RT constructions consisting of a numeral and a beverage nominal.
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conceptual features morphosyntactic features nominal is transnumeral (no morphosyntactic change) nominal is plural (morphosyntactic change)
nominal refers to substance (no conceptual enrichment)
nominal refers to portions of the substance (conceptual enrichment)
Icelandic (tvo kaffi)
German (zwei Wein)
English (two coffees) German (zwei Martinis) Icelandic (tvo bjóra)
Table 1. Correlation of conceptual and morphosyntactic features of beverage nominals in RT constructions. From the perspective of the grammatical-conceptual interface, these findings suggest two kinds of distinctions. First, they support a distinction between syntactic and semantic classifications in the mass/count domain, since elements of the same syntactic mass/count category, namely transnumeral (= non-plural) nominals, can belong to different semantic mass/count categories denoting either substances or objects. In particular, transnumeral beverage nominals are substance denoting in Icelandic RT (as well as in their basic, that is, non-RT interpretation in English, Icelandic, and German), while they are object denoting in German RT. Second, our analysis supports a distinction between language specific semantic and general conceptual aspects of mass/count coercion. While there are always the same packer associations between substances and portions of substances available in the conceptual system (that is, associations that support the conceptual transitions underlying mass/count coercion), languages differ as to whether and how these associations are integrated into the semantic representation of the expressions employed in RT. In English and German, enriched interpretations that include packer concepts are available for beverage nominals in general, whereas in Icelandic this situation only holds for a few nouns (such as bjór ‘beer’), while for the others the packer aspect has to be contributed by an overt or phonologically empty container noun.
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Moreover, beverage nominals that receive enriched interpretations are pluralized and contribute an individuation function as part of their semantic representation in English and in Icelandic (for those nouns that allow enrichment at all), but only in a few cases in German. By default, in German RT the beverage nominal remains transnumeral, and consequently the individuation aspect has to be contributed by an explicit or implicit numeral classifier. Since there is also another marked kind of plural construction in German that follows the English pattern, this second difference occurs not only between languages, but can also be observed between different nouns in one language (for example, German Bier versus Martini). In addition, as our data have shown, different options can even be available for individual nouns (as is the case for Schnaps). Hence, we find inter- and intralinguistic differences as to whether reference shifts leading to enriched packer interpretations are available for the beverage nouns in RT at all, and if so, whether or not they bring with them a shift to semantic individuation and plural behavior of the nominal in question. This variation in view of the same underlying conceptual representations supports an analysis of coercion that makes use of a mediating level of semantic structure to account for language specific, as well as lexical idiosyncratic differences in the integration of conceptual structures into the grammatical system.33 It suggests that there is no direct way from concepts to grammar, but rather that conceptual structures enter the linguistic system via semantic representations that take into account grammatical and lexical constraints. Under this view, semantic representations constitute the interface between grammatical and conceptual structures rather in the way that phonological representations constitute the interface between grammatical and phonetic structures. While the semantic interface accounts for the way that the grammatical system of a language accesses and integrates representations of meaning, the phonological interface 33
See Bierwisch 1983, Pinker 1989, Lang 1994, Wunderlich 1991, Dölling 2001, and Wiese 2004 for a distinction of grammatical semantic and conceptual structures in the derivation of interpretations for linguistic expressions.
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accounts for the way that the grammatical system of a language accesses and integrates representations of sounds.34 The three options for RT constructions we discussed in this article can be regarded as three different ways in which semantic representations integrate the conceptual representations of substances and their portions in the case of beverage nominals. They identify which conceptual representations can be accessed (that is, whether a beverage nominal can only refer to a substance or whether it can also undergo coercion and refer to portions of this substance), and in what form they enter the grammatical system (that is, whether the nominal is semantically individuated or non-individuated, and accordingly morphosyntactically plural or transnumeral). Figure 6 illustrates this organization of linguistic meaning; that is, the integration of substance and portion concepts into the grammatical system via semantic representations, for beverage nominals in the different kinds of RT constructions we found in English, German, and Icelandic.
GRAMMATICAL SYSTEM
SEMANTIC INTERFACE
CONCEPTUAL SYSTEM
(zwei) Bier (transnumeral)
(tvo) kaffi (transnumeral)
non-individuated, no coercion
substance (beverage)
non-individuated, coercion
(association via packer concepts)
(two) beers (tvo) bjóra (zwei) Martinis (plural)
individuated, coercion
portions of substance (servings of beverage)
Figure 6. Integration of conceptual representations into the grammatical system via semantics. One way to look at the mediating semantic level is to regard it as a system that captures the generation of QUALIA STRUCTURES from general 34
For a discussion of these architectural parallels, see Wiese 2003 (chapter 5), 2004.
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conceptual structures, as suggested within the Generative Lexicon framework.35 These qualia structures are defined as a part of lexical representations that integrates those aspects of conceptual information relevant for the flexibility of lexical items in the generation and adjustment of meaning in complex constructions, a prominent example being coercion. Accordingly, the qualia structure of an English beverage noun such as beer has to include such information about the substance beer as is necessary to identify its function as a drink and to associate it with packer concepts in restaurant contexts. Under this approach, the function of a semantic level understood as a system mediating between conceptual and grammatical representations is to identify the elements that enter such qualia structures in the representation of beverage nominals in different languages, and to determine which associated concepts (in our case, packer concepts) can be integrated in the course of semantic composition into the linguistic representations that these items enter. As our discussion has shown, this process of generating enriched interpretations is not based on a straightforward, immediate access to (classes of) associated representations in the conceptual system, but is subject to language specific constraints that govern the availability of enriched interpretations for certain expressions, as well as the way this enrichment is reflected in their grammatical behavior. This speaks for an analysis of coercion as a genuinely semantic—as opposed to general conceptual or syntactic—phenomenon, a phenomenon that is located at the interface between the conceptual and the linguistic system, that is, on a level of semantic representations. REFERENCES Bierwisch, Manfred. 1983. Semantische und konzeptuelle Repräsentation lexikalischer Einheiten. Untersuchungen zur Semantik, ed. by Rudolf Ruzicka and Wolfgang Motsch, 61–99. Berlin: Akademie. Bloom, Paul. 1994. Syntax-semantics mappings as an explanation for some transitions in language development. Other children, other languages: Theoretical issues in language development, ed. by Yonata Levy, 41–75. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. 35
See Pustejovsky 1991, 1995.
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Bloom, Paul. 2000. How children learn the meanings of words. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Brown, Roger W. 1957. Linguistic determinism and the parts of speech. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 55.1–5. Bunt, Harry C. 1985. The formal representation of (quasi-)continuous concepts. Formal theories of the commonsense world, ed. by Jerry R. Hobbs and Robert C. Moore, 37–70. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Corbett, Greville G. 2000. Number. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dölling, Hannes. 2001. Systematische Bedeutungsvariationen: Semantische Form und kontextuelle Interpretation (Linguistische Arbeitsberichte, 78). Leipzig: Leipzig University. Egg, Markus. 2004. Anti-Ikonizität an der Syntax-Semantik-Schnittstelle. To appear in Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft. Eschenbach, Carola. 1993. Semantics of number. Journal of Semantics 10.1–31. Greenberg, Joseph H. 1973. Numeral classifiers and substantival number. Problems in the genesis of a linguistic type. Working Papers on Language Universals 9.1–39. Indriason, orsteinn G. 1999. Um eignarfallssamsetningar og arar samsetningar í íslensku. [On genitive compounds and other compounds in Icelandic.] Íslenskt mál 21.107–150. Jackendoff, Ray S. 1997. The architecture of the language faculty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kayne, Richard S. 2003a. Some notes on comparative syntax, with special reference to English and French. Unpublished ms., New York University. Kayne, Richard S. 2003b. Silent years, silent hours. Grammar in focus, vol. 2, Festschrift for Christer Platzack, 18 November 2003, ed. by Lars-Olof Delsing, Gunlög Josefsson, Halldór Sigurdsson, and Cecilia Falk, 209–226. Lund: Department of Scandinavian Languages, Lund University. Kress, Bruno. 1982. Isländische Grammatik. Leipzig: Enzyklopädie. Krifka, Manfred. 1995. A theory of common nouns. The generic book, ed. by Gregory N. Carlson and Francis Jeffry Pelletier, 398–411. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Lang, Ewald. 1994. Semantische vs. konzeptuelle Struktur: Unterscheidung und Überschneidung. Kognitive Semantik, ed. by Monika Schwarz, 25–41. Tübingen: Narr. McElree, Brian, Matthew J. Traxler, Martin J. Pickering, Ray S. Jackendoff and Rachel E. Seely. 2001. Coercion in on-line semantic processing. Cognition 78.B17–B25. Pelletier, Francis Jeffry. 1975/1979. Non-singular reference: Some preliminaries. Mass terms: Some philosophical problems, ed. by Francis Jeffry Pelletier, 1–14. Dordrecht: Reidel.
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Pelletier, Francis Jeffry, and Schubert, Lenhard K. 1989. Mass expressions. Handbook of philosophical logic, vol. 4, ed. by Dov M. Gabbay and Franz Guenthner, 327–407. Dordrecht: Reidel. Piñango, Maria, Edgar Zurif, and Ray S. Jackendoff. 1999. Real-time processing implications of aspectual coercion at the syntax-semantics interface. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 28.394–414. Pinker, Steven. 1989. Learnability and cognition. The acquisition of argument structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Prasada, Sandeep. 1996. Quantification, arbitrariness of structure, and the countmass noun distinction. Proceedings of the 20th annual Boston University conference on language development, I–II, ed. by Andy Stringfellow, Dalia Cahana-Amitay, Elizabeth Hughes, and Andrea Zukowski, 600–609. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. Prasada, Sandeep. 1999. Names for things and stuff: An Aristotelian perspective. Language, logic, and concepts: Essays in memory of John Macnamara, ed. by Ray S. Jackendoff, Paul Bloom, and Karen Wynn, 119– 146. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pustejovsky, James. 1991. The generative lexicon. Computational Linguistics 17.409–441. Pustejovsky, James. 1995. The generative lexicon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Smith-Stark, T. Cedric. 1974. The plurality split. Chicago Linguistics Society 10.657–671. Todorova, Marina, Kathy Straub, William Badecker, and Robert Frank. 2000. Aspectual coercion and online computation of sentential aspect. Proceedings of the 22nd annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society, ed. by Lila R. Gleitman and Aravind K. Joshi, 545–550. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Wiese, Heike. 1997a. Zahl und Numerale. Eine Untersuchung zur Korrelation konzeptueller und sprachlicher Strukturen (Chapter 7: KardinalKonstruktionen) (Studia Grammatica, 44). Berlin: Akademie. Wiese, Heike. 1997b. Semantics of nouns and nominal number. ZAS Papers in Linguistics 8.136–163. Wiese, Heike. 2003. Sprachliche Arbitrarität als Schnittstellenphänomen. Habilitationsschrift, Humboldt University, Berlin. Wiese, Heike. 2004. Semantics as a gateway to language. Mediating between concepts and language, ed. by Holden Härtl and Heike Tappe, 197–222. (Trends in Linguistics, 152). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Wiese, Heike, and Piñango, Maria. 2001. Mass and count in language and cognition: Some evidence from language comprehension. Proceedings of the 23rd annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society, ed. by Johanna D. Moore and Keith Stenning, 1244. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
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Wunderlich, Dieter. 1991. Bedeutung und Gebrauch. Semantik Semantics, ed. by Arnim von Stechow and Dieter Wunderlich, 32–52. (Handbücher zur Sprachund Kommunikationswissenschaft, 6.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Institut für deutsche Sprache und Linguistik Humboldt Universität Berlin Unter den Linden 6 10099 Berlin Germany [
[email protected]] Department of Psychology Brandeis University MS 062 PO Box 549110 Waltham, MA 02454 USA [
[email protected]]
Journal of Germanic Linguistics 17.1 (2005):39–75
REVIEWS
Prolific Domains: On the Anti-Locality of Movement Dependencies. By Kleanthes K. Grohmann. (Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 66). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2003. Pp. xiv, 369. Hardcover. $138.00. Reviewed by JUSTIN M. FITZPATRICK, Massachusetts Institute of Technology This monograph consists of a revision of the author’s doctoral dissertation, with the addition of extensions and related work by the author and collaborators. In this work Grohmann makes the interesting suggestion that along with STANDARD LOCALITY (the familiar upper bound on the length of syntactic dependencies), movement dependencies are subject to a lower bound, that is, ANTI-LOCALITY. This suggestion is implemented through a partition of the clause into three parts (roughly the theta-domain, the agreement domain, and the left periphery) and some simple conditions on movement between and within these domains. The result is a new candidate proposal in the realm of multiple/cyclic spell-out theories that provides a novel analysis of anaphora in several domains, as well as of left dislocation of various types. Although the proposal also has interesting theoretical implications (for example, a less stipulative ban on “improper movement”), it suffers from some empirical and theoretical shortcomings, which I will outline below. The Anti-Locality thesis introduced in chapter 1 is implemented through the theory of PROLIFIC DOMAINS. According to this theory, the clause consists of three parts, or domains, defined over familiar syntactic categories: (1) the -domain, in which -roles are discharged/assigned/ checked (material at and below the vP level), (2) the -domain, where agreement/-features are checked (material above the vP level including agreement projections (Agr), tense, and aspect), and (3) the -domain, the location of syntactically represented discourse roles, such as topic and focus (a finely articulated left periphery along the lines of Rizzi 1997). Anti-Locality states that movement cannot take place within a single Prolific Domain. To some extent, Anti-Locality could be viewed as a response to critics of the line of research that seeks to explain syntactic dependencies © Society for Germanic Linguistics
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in terms of movement rather than construal, chains, or accidental binding (Hornstein 2001, Kayne 2002, among others). Since Hornstein (2001) makes crucial use of movement to -position, critics might ask why, if such movement is allowed, we do not observe sentences such as 1a with the meaning of 1b, given the possibility of the movement operation in 1c where John is merged as theme and moves to the external argument position. (1) a. *John likes. b. John likes himself. c. [vP John v [VP likes
]]
The Anti-Locality framework provides a principled answer. Movement within a single Prolific Domain (in 1, movement from one theta position to another within the same VP) is too local. If independent evidence for Anti-Locality could be found, this critique of movement into theta position would then disappear. This book attempts to provide such evidence. However, it should be noted that were Hornstein to be wrong, much of Grohmann’s proposal would still be tenable. In chapter 2 the following is introduced as an explicit Anti-Locality condition: Condition on Domain Exclusivity (CDE) (p. 78) For a given Prolific Domain , an object O in the phrase-marker must receive an exclusive interpretation at the interfaces, unless duplicity of O yields a drastic effect on the output of . Putting aside for the moment what “duplicity” and “drastic” mean, the CDE essentially states that a given object can only appear once in a Prolific Domain. Grohmann attempts to explain this restriction as a ban on ambiguity at the PF interface. A phonological form for a given Prolific Domain must contain unambiguous instructions. If an object appears twice in the domain, as it would if it moves domain-internally, ambiguity arises. However, there is one way to circumvent the ban on domain-internal movement imposed by the CDE: an object can appear more than once in a Prolific Domain if one copy of the object is pronounced differently from the other. Grohmann calls this escape hatch
Journal of Germanic Linguistics 17.1 (2005)
COPY SPELL-OUT.
41
This is, presumably, what is meant by the vague “drastic effect” condition above. While there is an intuitively appealing aspect to Prolific Domains and the CDE, Grohmann’s explanation of the CDE in terms of a PF ban on duplicate spell-out suffers somewhat from his adoption of Nunes’ (1995) approach to copy theory and deletion. Nunes argues that, due to the Linear Correspondence Axiom (Kayne 1994), only one copy of a given syntactic object can be spelled out phonologically. Other copies, formed through movement (envisioned as copy+merger), must be deleted. Lower copies are generally deleted since they contain more unchecked features. But if copies can be deleted, it should be simple to circumvent the CDE and allow all sorts of domain-internal movement, as long as all copies (but one) are deleted. Grohmann addresses this concern to some extent by saying that unpronounced copies are not deleted, but ignored. This is presumably due to a spell-out algorithm (unspecified in the monograph) that determines for a given domain where a given phrase with multiple occurrences is spelled out. If this is true, then the adoption of Nunes’s approach to copy theory and deletion is only a hindrance. Grohmann’s work could be done by a simple remerger account of movement, without the problems introduced by a copy operation and subsequent deletion. Chapter 2 spells out the architecture of the system within which the Anti-Locality thesis is couched. The introductory material in the first two chapters might have benefited from additional editorial attention, as it may be vague and confusing at times. As such, it will be difficult to follow for readers not already familiar with recent work in minimalism. In fact, some of this material could have been omitted without affecting the book’s main proposals, although some material in chapter 2 becomes crucial later in the book. First, Grohmann argues against Chomsky’s (1995) proposal that little v is the locus of both external argument licensing and accusative case marking. Grohmann wishes to divorce the former, which is part of the -domain, from the latter, which is a related property. Second, Grohmann argues against the existence of multiple specifiers. The clausal architecture assumed here allows a single specifier for a given XP (formed either through direct merger or movement) and any number of adjuncts, which appear above the specifier and can only be formed through (external) merger. This approach to specifiers and adjuncts allows an account of certain facts
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about left dislocation addressed later in the book. However, when this issue is discussed, the reader is left wondering why one would wish to rule out multiple specifiers. Unsupported statements, such as “multiple specifiers are undesirable, do not buy us much empirically, and can be banned from the grammar” (p. 53) are even more puzzling, especially given much recent work on multiple specifiers (see, for example, Richards 1999). Following Chomsky (2000:116), Grohmann attempts to derive fundamental specifier-head, head-head, and head-complement relations through the use of what he calls the “Natural Relations” provided by merger. However, this attempt does not quite go through. While Grohmann is correct that the combination of SISTER and IMMEDIATELYCONTAIN, two relations that arguably fall out from the operation Merge, provides a natural account of the specifier-head relation, this same relation should hold between a head and the specifier of that head’s complement. Therefore, while Grohmann’s approach includes the SpecHead relation, it might be too permissive. Grohmann also argues for a greed-based over an attraction-based treatment of movement based on these relations. The SpecHead relation, viewed as ImmediatelyContain(Sister-Of (XP)), fits into a greed-based framework since it is the XP in the specifier position that checks features on the head, not the other way around. However, this deduction seems spurious to me. It is based on the assumption that the MotherDaughter relation (Immediately-Contain()) is fundamental, but the DaughterMother relation (Mother()) is not. Furthermore, the discussion is open to Chametsky’s (2003:200–201) critique that more “natural relations” are definable from these assumptions than are needed. Chapters 3 through 6 form the empirical core of the book. Chapter 3 presents a treatment of local anaphora as the result of too-local movement within the -domain, with Copy Spell-out of the lower trace as an anaphor, as in 2, where Copy Spell-out is shown as (X). (2)
[vP John v [VP likes John ( himself)]
This analysis is only available if movement to a theta position is possible, as it is in a system where theta roles are treated as features to be checked through merger or movement. This treatment of anaphora serves
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as a proof-of-concept of the CDE and Copy Spell-out in the -domain. It differs from other movement-based analyses of binding (see, for instance, Kayne 2002) in that the anaphor is not present prior to Copy Spell-out. In this chapter, anaphora in exceptional case marking contexts are also treated through Copy Spell-out, but in the -domain. The PF explanation of the CDE is challenged further if an analogous analysis applies to sentences that contain multiple anaphora, as in John is protecting himself from himself. Here one would expect the CDE to rule out multiple Copy Spell-out of John as himself. Grohmann acknowledges this problem, but provides no clear solution. Chapter 4 contains perhaps the most interesting empirical case study of the CDE and Copy Spell-out, namely that of left dislocation, including topicalization as in 3a, contrastive left dislocation (CLD) as in 3b, clitic left dislocation (CLLD) as in 3c, and two types of hanging topic left dislocation (HTLD), shown in 3d,e. (3) a. Diesen Mann mag ich this man know I ‘This man, I don’t know.’ b. Den Martin, den the Martin D-PRON
nicht. not
habe ich schon lange have I already long
German
German
nicht mehr gesehen. not anymore seen ‘Martin, I haven’t seen [him] in a long time.’ c. [Afton ton andra], dhen ton ksero. this the man not CLITIC know.1SG ‘This man, I don’t know [him].’ d. [Diese-r/-n Mann]—den/ihn habe ich this man PRON have I noch nie gesehen. yet never seen ‘This man, I’ve never seen him before.’
Greek
German
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e. [Diese-r/-n Mann]—ich habe this man I have
den/ihn
German
PRON
noch nie gesehen. yet never seen ‘This man, I’ve never seen him before.’ According to Grohmann, topicalization, CLD, and CLLD suggest that the left-dislocated XP is derived through movement from a clause internal position, while this is not true of HTLD. Evidence for this, some of it well-known, includes Case connectivity and reconstruction effects (binding of anaphora, bound variable readings, obviation of weak crossover) in the first three, but not in HTLD. Turning to CLD, we can ask how the left-dislocated XP could be moved from a clause-internal position when the resumptive pronoun (RP) is in the prototypical preverbal topic position, presumably moved from a clause-internal position. Grohmann suggests that the RP is the result of Copy Spell-out of a lower occurrence of XP within the -domain, as shown in 4. (4)
[CP XP [TopP XP (RP) V-Top0 [IP …XP… [vP …XP…]]]]
Here the dislocated XP moves to topic position (within the left-peripheral -domain), and then moves on to a “quasi-extra-sentential” CP projection. While it is not clear what this CP projection is, this movement is too local and only Copy Spell-out can make the derivation legitimate by the CDE. The assumptions regarding specifiers and adjuncts from chapter 2 allow an account of the ordering among HTLDed and CLDed XPs, where the former always appear to the left of the latter. One appealing aspect of Grohmann’s analysis of the demonstrative pronoun in CLD as the spell-out of a copy due to Anti-Locality is that resumptive pronouns now appear when standard (maximum-distance) locality is violated, as with islands for movement, and also when Anti-Locality is violated. This treatment of CLD might also provide an argument against chain formation as a plausible alternative to movement. In this case, one would have to posit a difference between chains in CLD and coreference (presumably also encoded with coindexation) in HTLD. Chapter 5 returns to CLLD and analyzes this phenomenon as Copy Spell-out in the -domain. Grohmann suggests that the CLLDed XP
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moves through two positions in an Agreement projection: one adjoined to the Agr head and one in the specifier of this head. The occurrence adjoined to the Agr head is spelled out as a clitic. The XP in [Spec,AgrP] then moves on to a left-peripheral topic position. (5)
[AgrP XP [Agr XP( Clitic)–Agr0] [vP …XP…]]
This analysis of CLLD is perhaps the book’s most problematic part. First, it predicts that all languages with CLLD should have clitic doubling. There is nothing inherent in 5 that would force XP to move on to a topic position, so the derivation should be possible in any clause. However, Italian is a classic example of a language with CLLD but no clitic doubling. Furthermore, since the left-dislocated XP does undergo movement to the -domain (presumably the domain of A-bar movement), the analysis falls to Cinque’s (1990) argument that if CLLD involves A-bar movement, it should license parasitic gaps, contrary to fact. The advantage of the CLD and CLLD analyses is that they would explain several observed differences between the two, as well as moving toward an account of why and in which languages these types of left dislocation should occur. Why does Copy Spell-out emerge as an anaphor in some cases, a pronoun in others, and a clitic in still others? Grohmann comes close to explaining this distinction by appeal to different domains: anaphors arise in the -domain, clitics in the -domain (when the language has Agrrelated clitics), and pronouns in the -domain. However, the analysis of ECM anaphors as arising in the -domain makes this line of reasoning less consistent. Furthermore, the author provides no explanation for why only lower copies undergo Copy Spell-out as a pronoun/anaphor/clitic. Grohmann alludes to a possible feature-based explanation along the lines of Nunes 1995, but, as noted above, Nunes’ assumptions may be problematic for the CDE theory. Chapter 6 summarizes Grohmann and Haegeman 2003 and extends the Copy Spell-out paradigm to the DP level, where Grohmann argues that the DP contains multiple Prolific Domains (analogous to clausal structure), and that domain-internal movement within the DP also triggers Copy Spell-out. The latter is used to account for pronominal possessor doubling in Germanic, as in German dem Vater sein Auto ‘the father’s car’ (lit. the father his car). If movement (and Copy Spell-out) is
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at play here, Hornstein’s (2003) suggestion that movement does not underlie control in DPs (as in John’s attempt PRO to leave) may be at risk. Chapter 7 presents some of the most interesting ideas of the book. Grohmann reviews the long history of research into syntactic cyclicity and develops a view of cyclicity in the Prolific Domains framework in the form of two generalizations. (6) a. Inter-Clausal Movement Generalization Movement across a clause boundary can only target a position within the same Prolific Domain as the source position. b. Intra-Clausal Movement Generalization Movement within a clause always targets the next highest Prolific Domain. The combination of 6a and 6b, together with the unnoted assumption that a syntactic object must have an occurrence in each clause between the highest and lower occurrence of that object, ensure a strongly falsifiable type of cyclicity. Moving phrases always target either the next highest clause-internal domain or the same domain in next highest clause. The result is a satisfying account of so-called “improper movement” (the ban on A-bar movement followed by A-movement) without simply stipulating that this type of movement is “improper”. Grohmann adopts a MULTIPLE SPELL-OUT approach that differs in crucial ways from both Uriagereka’s (1999) and the phase-based approach put forth by Chomsky (2000). In the Prolific Domains framework, each domain— (vP), (IP), and (CP)—is submitted to PF and LF computation after it is built. Cyclicity in movement is viewed as a fundamental property of this system, not as an accidental property of intervening heads, as in theories that incorporate the EPP as a trigger for movement. The principles in 6 predict that raising verbs embedded under control verbs should behave as if they were control verbs, a prediction that Grohmann claims is born out in English. For example, in 7a John is raised clause-internally from its first theta position to the -domain, from where it raises clause-internally to the -domain of the raising verb seem. However, from here John would have to move to the -domain of the control verb hope, a move ruled out by 6b. Therefore, the derivation
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must be as in 7b, where John moves from -domain to -domain until it reaches hope. This entails that John must be an argument of seem, and so seem must behave like a control verb, a prediction Grohmann claims is born out. (7) John hopes to seem to be intelligent. a. *[ John hopes [ John to [ seem [ John to be [ John intelligent]]]]] b. [ John hopes [ to [ John seem [ to be [ John intelligent]]]]] But this prediction does not hold up cross-linguistically. Rizzi (1986) shows that a coreferential anaphor can appear between an NP and a controlled PRO, as in 8a, but not between an NP and its trace position in raising, as in 8b. (8) a. Gianni1 si1 promette di [PRO1 essere diligente]. Gianni self promises to-be diligent ‘Gianni promises himself to be diligent.’ b. *Gianni1 si1 sembra [t1 essere inteligente]. Gianni self seems to-be intelligent ‘Gianni seems to himself to be intelligent.’ The discussion of 7 suggests that when embedded under a control verb (such as sperare), raising verbs (such as sembrare) should pattern with 8a. However, as shown in 9, this is not the case.1 (9) *Gianni1 spera di sembrarsi1 inteligente. Gianni hopes to-seem to-self intelligent ‘Gianni hopes to seem to himself to be intelligent.’ Further problems arise with this strict view of cyclicity if whadjuncts in the -domain must pass through the -domain on the way to their surface -domain position. The question is what type of agreement
1
My thanks to David Pesetsky for pointing out this argument to me, and to Enzo Moscati for the Italian data.
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forces adjunct movement to the -domain since most (all?) languages lack agreement with adjuncts. As a whole, the proposals of the book are thought provoking and appealing. Grohmann does a good job of motivating his proposals independently, so Anti-Locality does not become an ad hoc patch required by Hornstein’s (2001) treatment of control as movement. However, since it adopts many of Hornstein’s assumptions, the book is open to criticism along the lines of Landau 2003 and Culicover and Jackendoff 2001. The tripartite division of the clause has intuitive appeal, and Grohmann’s treatment of cyclicity within the three-domain system provides an interesting alternative in the realm of multiple spell-out theories. It also provides a satisfying ban on improper movement. While empirical and theoretical problems remain, they are outweighed by the book’s virtues and should serve as challenges to those pursuing a theory of AntiLocality. REFERENCES Chametsky, Robert A. 2003. Phrase structure. Minimalist syntax, ed. by Randall Hendrick, 192–225. Oxford: Blackwell. Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The minimalist program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chomsky, Noam. 2000. Minimalist inquiries: The framework. Step by step, ed. by Roger Martin, David Michaels, and Juan Uriagereka, 89–156. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cinque, Guglielmo. 1990. Types of A-bar dependencies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Culicover, Peter and Ray Jackendoff. 2001. Control is not movement. Linguistic Inquiry 32.493–511. Grohmann, Kleathes and Liliane Haegeman. 2003. Resuming reflexives. Nordlyd 31. Proceedings of the19th Scandinavian conference in linguistics, ed. by Anne Dahl, Kristine Bentzen, and Peter Svenonius, 46–62. Hornstein, Norbert. 2001. Move! A minimalist theory of construal. Oxford: Blackwell. Hornstein, Norbert. 2003. On control. Minimalist syntax, ed. by Randall Hendrick, 6–81. Oxford: Blackwell. Kayne, Richard. 1994. The anti-symmetry of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kayne, Richard. 2002. Pronouns and their antecedents. Derivation and explanation in the minimalist program, ed. by Samuel David Epstein and T. Daniel Seely, 133–166. Oxford: Blackwell. Landau, Idan. 2003. Movement out of control. Linguistic Inquiry 34.471–498.
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Nunes, Jairo. 1995. The copy theory of movement and linearization of chains in the minimalist program. Doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland. Richards, Norvin. 1999. Featural cyclicity and the ordering of multiple specifiers. Working minimalism, ed. by Samual David Epstein and Norbert Hornstein, 127–158. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rizzi, Luigi. 1986. On chain formation. The syntax of pronominal clitics. Syntax and semantics, vol. 19, ed. by Hagit Borer, 65–95. New York: Academic Press. Rizzi, Luigi. 1997. The fine structure of the left periphery. Elements of grammar: Handbook of generative syntax, ed. by Liliane Haegeman, 281– 337. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Uriagereka, Juan. 1999. Multiple spell out. Working minimalism, ed. by Samuel David Epstein and Norbert Hornstein, 251–282. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. 32-D866 MIT 77 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02139 USA [
[email protected]]
The Syntax of Ditransitives: Evidence from Clitics. By Elena Anagnostopoulou. (Studies in Generative Grammar, 54). BerlinNew York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003. Pp. xiv, 379. Hardcover. $114.40. Reviewed by GUNNAR HRAFN HRAFNBJARGARSON, University of Oslo “The fundamental challenge of comparative linguistics is to find a way of doing justice to both the similarities and the differences without contradiction, without empty compromise, and without sacrificing one truth to the other” (Baker 2001:16). It is my belief that Anagnostopoulou has managed to do this in her book in such a way that it can only be admired. The topic that Anagnostopoulou has chosen is—to put it mildly—rather complex, and as to complicate things even more, Anagnostopoulou uses the entire theoretical apparatus provided by the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995), including multiple specifiers,
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“tucking in”, equidistance, minimal domains, EPP, long-distance agree, etc. (In fact, Boeckx (2004) criticizes Anagnostopoulou’s use of the whole range of theoretical apparatus.) Nevertheless, the book is very easy to read, and Anagnostopoulou’s argumentation is easy to follow. For example, it is the rule rather than the exception that she uses examples from many different languages in support of each of her claims. In this way, a reader like myself who sometimes finds it difficult to decode and understand the Greek (as well as the Romance) data, can be reassured by the fact that Anagnostopoulou usually elaborates on her claims by showing the direction the Germanic languages (Dutch, English, German and Scandinavian) choose to go. These languages sometimes follow Greek and/or Romance, and sometimes they choose an altogether different direction. Although the central focus of the book is on Greek clitic doubling and the Greek double object construction, in this review I am mainly concerned with Anagnostopoulou’s analysis of the Germanic languages, and in particular, passivization and object shift in Scandinavian and constructions with oblique (or quirky) subjects in Icelandic. First, I summarize the main theoretical claims that Anagnostopoulou makes. The book is divided into five chapters. In the first chapter, Anagnostopoulou briefly introduces the overall embracing claim of the book that a dative (the indirect object, henceforth IO) blocks movement of a lower nominative if “(i) the dative is higher than the base position of the nominative and (ii) not contained in the same domain as the nominative [...]” (p. 4). Thus, the derivation in 1 (Anagnostopoulou’s 2, p. 4) is ill-formed, whereas the derivation in 2 (Anagnostopoulou’s 3, p. 5) is well-formed because “the features of the dative move out of the way of the lower nominative [...] and thus the higher dative argument does not count anymore for locality.” (1)
[NOM [Domain DAT [Domain tNOM]]]
(2)
[NOM [DAT-Clitic [Domain tDAT-Clitic [Domain tNOM]]]] STEP I STEP II
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In the second chapter, Anagnostopoulou establishes the generalization reflected in 1 and 2 that in Greek a nominative DP may not move across a dative DP unless the dative DP is realized as a clitic or a part of a clitic doubling chain. Here too, the typology of ditransitives is investigated. Anagnostopoulou argues that two different types of double object constructions should be distinguished, based on where the IO is base-generated. According to Anagnostopoulou, an IO may either be base-generated high within the VP (only this construction qualifies as a true double object construction in Anagnostopoulou’s system) or it may be base-generated low within the VP (in which case it shows the characteristics of a prepositional dative). The crucial difference is, in Anagnostopoulou’s view (following Marantz 1993), that in addition to the main verbal root only the former (the true double object construction) contains a light applicative head (see 3). (3)
v1P SUB
v’ v-TR
v2P IO
v’ vAPPL
VP V
DO
In some languages the light applicative head (vAPPL) may assign morphological case to the IO, while in other languages it may not. vAPPL is also responsible for the different types of object shift found in the Scandinavian languages. Norwegian and Swedish differ from Danish and Icelandic in that the former allow for non-parallel object shift (that is, the order of the IO and the direct object, henceforth DO, can be reversed), whereas the latter only allow for parallel object shift. According to Anagnostopoulou, this difference is due to the fact that in Norwegian and Swedish, but not in Danish and Icelandic, vAPPL allows for an additional specifier position into which the DO can move on its way to the target position of object shift (an outer specifier of vP).
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The third chapter introduces the three “ingredients” that are needed for a locality-based account of ditransitives cross-linguistically; namely Case and the EPP, c-command, and minimal domains. In this chapter, Anagnostopoulou argues that equidistance (and not only closest ccommand) plays a crucial role in the notion of locality. For example, Amovement of derived subjects across higher goals or experiencers is ruled out in the passive when the two arguments are not in the same minimal domain, but such movement is allowed whenever the two arguments are in the same minimal domain, that is, are equidistant from the target position. In the fourth chapter, Anagnostopoulou shows how minimal link condition violations can be avoided if the dative DP is realized as a clitic, or if the dative DP is a part of a clitic doubling chain. In such constructions, movement is not ruled out because the cliticized or the clitic doubled argument is in the same minimal domain as the target of movement. In the fifth chapter, Anagnostopoulou discusses -feature checking in environments where a dative DP enters into a Move/Agree relation with T/transitive v. In particular, Anagnostopoulou discusses two types of person restrictions: the PERSON-CASE CONSTRAINT (PC-Constraint) and the PERSON RESTRICTION ON NOMINATIVE OBJECTS (PRNConstraint). The PC-Constraint is a restriction on clitics in Romance, Greek, Swiss German, Basque and many other languages (also known as the *me/lui or I-II constraint; see, for example, Perlmutter 1971, Kayne 1975, and Bonet 1991, 1994, among many others). Anagnostopoulou’s Greek examples (p. 252, 342) are found in 4. (Note that 4d is incorrectly translated in the book as they will send you to him). (4) a. Tha mu to FUT C1.GEN.1SG C1.ACC.3SG.NEUT ‘They will send it to me.’
stilune send.3PL
b. Tha su ton stilune FUT C1.GEN.2SG C1.ACC.3SG.MASC send.3PL ‘They will send him to you.’ c. *Tha to me stilune FUT C1.GEN.3SG.NEUT/MASC C1.ACC.1SG send.3PL ‘They will send me to him.’
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d. *Tha mu se stilune FUT C1.GEN.1SG C1.ACC.2SG send.3PL ‘They will send you to me.’ The PRN-Constraint is attested in Icelandic DAT-NOM constructions (that is, constructions where the subject is dative and the object is nominative), and in Italian impersonal si-constructions (compare D’Alessandro 2003). The PRN-Constraint prohibits agreement with nominative DPs in NOMINATIVE WITH INFINITIVE constructions (compare Sigursson 1989, 1996); that is, when the nominative DP is not in the same clause as the verb. The example in 5b shows that the verb can agree neither in person nor in number with the first person nominative DP. The example in 5a shows that such constructions are grammatical if the verb does not agree with the first person nominative DP. (5) a. Ykkur ótti ég /vi You.DAT.PL thought.3SG I.NOM/we.NOM ‘You found me/us amusing.’ b. *Ykkur You.DAT.SG
fyndin amusing
óttum /óttu vi fyndin thought.1PL/thought.3PL we.NOM amusing
The PRN-constraint also prohibits the occurrence of first and second person nominative objects. The example in 6 shows that nominative objects cannot be first person (the same holds for second person, but not for third person), even if the verb shows default agreement (compare Sigursson 1996 for a detailed discussion of the grammaticality of such examples; for me, they are ungrammatical). (6) *ér líkai / líkuum / líkuu vi You.DAT liked.3SG / liked.1PL / liked.3PL we.NOM Anagnostopoulou shows that although the PC-Constraint and the PRN-Constraint have many similarities, they differ in three crucial ways (p. 264). First, the PC-Constraint only holds if there is an external argument present, whereas the PRN-Constraint only holds if there is no external argument (Anagnostopoulou assumes that dative subjects are
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derived subjects, compare p. 275, tree 369).1 Second, the PC-Constraint, but not the PRN-Constraint affects weak elements, and finally, the “emergency strategies” induced by the two constraints are different. Romance and Greek “rescue” the respective construction by replacing the clitic with a strong pronoun, whereas in Icelandic the verb simply does not show agreement with the nominative DP. I turn now to what I think are the problematic aspects of Anagnostopoulou’s analysis of passivization and object shift in Scandinavian and Icelandic DAT-NOM constructions. As mentioned, the PRN-Constraint does two fairly different things at the same time. First, the PRN-Constraint regulates the agreement relationship between a verb and a nominative DP, which is not an object but the subject of a small clause. Second, the PRN-Constraint prohibits the occurrence of first/second person nominative objects. In Hrafnbjargarson 2004, I show that the PRN-Constraint can be accounted for in terms of the harmonic alignment of prominence hierarchies (person, case, and grammatical relation). The advantage of such an analysis is that the PRN-Constraint will only prohibit the occurrence of first and second person pronouns as nominative objects, whereas other constraints will regulate the impoverished agreement relationship between the verb and the nominative DP in Nominative with Infinitive constructions. Anagnostopoulou (p. 239ff.) also discusses the intervention effect of dative arguments in Icelandic. In DATIVE WITH INFINITIVE constructions, the matrix verb cannot show agreement with a nominative object in the lower clause. The example in 7 is Anagnostopoulou’s example 327. (7) Mér fannst /*fundust henni leiast Me.DAT seemed.3SG /seemed.3PL her.DAT be-bored ‘I thought she was bored with them.’
eir they.NOM
Anagnostopoulou (p. 240) also mentions that such intervention effects are not found in transitive expletive constructions where the associate of the expletive is a dative DP.
1
This assumption is rather appealing to me, as I think that it makes the correct predictions about the behavior of verbs in DAT-NOM constructions. For example, they cannot occur in the passive (as a consequence of one argument already having been promoted).
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(8) a finnast sumum börnum svona leikir skemmtilegir There seem.3PL some children.DAT such games.NOM fun ‘Some children think that such games are fun.’ Following Chomsky 2000, 2001, Anagnostopoulou assumes that the dative DP enters into an Agree relation with T (the dative DP checks person on T) and that the nominative DP checks number on T. The intervention effect can thus be explained if one assumes that the dative does not enter into an Agree relation with T in 7. Unfortunately, the data that Anagnostopoulou presents do not show the whole picture. All her examples have plural dative arguments as the associate of an expletive, but as Holmberg and Hróarsdóttir (2003:1000) show it matters whether the intervening dative is plural or singular. When the intervening dative is singular, the verb cannot show agreement with the embedded nominative (9b), whereas if the intervening dative is plural such agreement is fine (10b). (9) a. a There
fannst einhverjum found.SG some
essar ljósmyndir these photographs.NOM
manni man.DAT
ljótar ugly
‘A man found these photographs ugly.’ b. *a fundust einhverjum There found.PL some
manni man.DAT
essar ljósmyndir ljótar these photographs.NOM ugly (10) a. a fannst mörgum mönnum There found.SG many.DAT men.DAT essar these
ljósmyndir photographs.NOM
ljótar ugly
‘Many men found these photographs ugly.’
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b. a fundust mörgum mönnum there found.PL many.DAT men.DAT essar these
ljósmyndir photographs.NOM
ljótar ugly
‘Many men found these photographs ugly.’ From example 10b we cannot determine whether the verb shows agreement with the dative subject or the nominative object. However, we might conclude that the dative DP really can check number on T as well as person, and in fact there are some arguments that speak in favor of such an analysis. In my dialect, which is an obligatory agreement dialect (that is, verbs obligatorily show agreement with third person nominative objects), questions such as in 11, where the nominative element is plural and the dative subject may be interpreted as either singular or plural, have different interpretations depending on whether the verb shows default agreement or plural agreement. (11) a. Hverjum fannst ljósmyndirnar ljótar? who.DAT.SG found.SG photographs-the.NOM ugly ‘Who (which man) found these photographs ugly?’ b. Hverjum fundust ljósmyndirnar ljótar? who.DAT.PL found.PL photographs-the.NOM ugly ‘Who (or which men) found these photographs ugly?’ In 11a, where the verb shows default agreement (third person singular), the subject is interpreted as singular. In 11b, where the verb shows number agreement, the subject is interpreted as plural. As Anagnostopoulou discusses in detail, Icelandic ditransitive verbs fall into two classes. One class of verbs (gefa ‘give’, segja ‘tell’, sna ‘show’, etc.) allows symmetric passives (that is, both the IO and the DO may raise to the subject position), while the other class of verbs (skila ‘return’, svipta ‘deprive’, ræna ‘rob’, etc.) only allows asymmetric passives (that is, only the IO may raise to the subject position). Following Falk 1990, Holmberg 1991, Holmberg and Platzack 1995, and Collins and Thráinsson 1996, Anagnostopoulou assumes that the verbs in the former class have a double base: one where the goal is basegenerated above the theme (high in the VP, and thus a true double object
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construction), and another where the goal is base-generated below the theme (low in the VP, and thus corresponds to a PP-construction). As a result, with verbs like gefa ‘give’, both orders, IO > DO, and DO > IO are found. The latter word order is known as the INVERSION CONSTRUCTION. One of the characteristics of the inversion construction is that the IO must be focused or stressed, and therefore it cannot be object shifted. The examples in 12 are Anagnostopoulou’s 161, originally from Collins and Thráinsson 1996:415. In 12b, I have added the negation to show the ungrammaticality of object shift. (12) a. Hann gaf konunginum ambáttina ekki He.NOM gave king-the.DAT maidservant-the.ACC not ‘He did not give the king the maidservant.’ b. Hann gaf (ekki) ambáttina He.NOM gave (not) maidservant-the.ACC
(ekki) (not)
konunginum (*ekki) king-the.DAT (*not) *‘He did not give the maidservant the king.’ Accordingly, these verbs have symmetric passives. (13) a. Konunginum var gefin ambáttin king-the.DAT was given maidservant-the.NOM ‘The king was given the maidservant.’ b. Ambáttin var gefin konunginum Maidservant-the.NOM was given king-the.DAT *‘The maidservant was given the king.’ Verbs in the other class do not participate in the inversion construction, and therefore do not have the symmetric passive. Nevertheless, even though verbs in the former class all have the symmetric passive, not all of them seem to participate in the inversion construction. One of these verbs is lána ‘lend’. (Note that Anagnostopoulou, p. 199, example 171b, brings an example from Collins and Thráinsson 1996 that is parallel to 14c. My six informants and I do not share their grammaticality judgments.) The examples in 14 show that
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with lána ‘lend’, the IO must precede the DO even though the IO is stressed, as in 14c. (14) a. Hann lánai (ekki) bóndanum (ekki) He lent (not) farmer-the.DAT (not) grafolann stud-the.ACC
(ekki) (not)
‘He did not lend the farmer the stud.’ b. *Hann lánai (ekki) grafolann (ekki) bóndanum (ekki) He lent (not) stud-the.ACC (not) farmer-the.DAT (not) c. *Hann lánai (ekki) grafolann (ekki) bóndanum (ekki) He lent (not) stud-the.ACC (not) farmer-the.DAT (not) The examples in 15, however, show that the verb lána has a symmetric passive. In 15a, the dative goal, bóndanum ‘the farmer’, has raised to the subject position. In 15b the nominative theme, grafolinn ‘the stud’, has raised to the subject position. It is necessary to embed the passive sentences in a question to avoid V2 effects, such as the possibility of topicalization. Note also that if 15b were derived from the inversion construction, the prediction would be that the dative goal should be focused or stressed. This is not the case in either 13b or 15b. (15)
Hún vill vita … She wants know … ‘She would like to know …’
a. hvort bóndanum hafi ekki veri lánaur grafolinn whether farmer-the.DAT has not been lent stud-the.NOM ‘whether the farmer has not been lent the stud.’ b. hvort grafolinn hafi ekki veri lánaur bóndanum farmer-the.DAT whether stud-the.NOM has not been lent ‘whether the farmer has not been lent the stud.’ Apparently, in some respects the verb lána ‘lend’ behaves like verbs that do not allow the symmetric passive (because it does not occur in the inversion construction). However, in other respects it seems to behave
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like verbs that allow the symmetric passive (because both of its internal arguments may raise to the subject position). Since lána does not occur in the inversion construction, the derivation of 15b is problematic for Anagnostopoulou’s analysis. As she argues (chapter 3, section 8.2.1), vAPPL does not allow for an additional specifier in Icelandic (this also explains why Icelandic does not have non-parallel object shift as found in Norwegian and Swedish). If vAPPL allowed for an additional specifier, the nominative argument and the dative argument would be in the same minimal domain and the nominative argument could move to the outer specifier of v without violating locality conditions on Amovement. After having moved to the outer specifier of v, the nominative argument could move on to T. Since vAPPL does not allow for an additional specifier in Icelandic, the movement of the nominative argument across the dative argument in constructions such as 15b violates the MLC. Finally, let us turn to multiple specifiers and “tucking in”. I will not discuss the usual arguments against multiple specifiers; for example, that multiple specifiers pose a learnability problem as it can be difficult to figure out whether the structure is made of one projection with two specifiers or two projections with an empty head in the higher projection. Instead, I am concerned with the linear order of multiple specifiers. Anagnostopoulou assumes (following many others) that the negation and sentence medial adverbs mark the left edge of vP in Scandinavian. Object shift is then movement into an outer specifier, above the negation. If both objects in a double object construction are object shifted, the DO “tucks in” between the IO and the negation (the tree in 16 is Anagnostopoulou’s example 234, p. 155; I have added the negation). First, the IO moves to an outer specifier of v1P. Since the IO does not intervene anymore, the DO can object shift and “tuck in” below the IO.
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(16)
v1P
IO
v1P DO
v1P NEG
v1P Subj
v’ v-TR
v2P tIO
v’ vAPPL V
VP tDO
The negation occupies an extra specifier between the specifier into which the DO has been shifted and the specifier in which the subject is base-generated. Putting aside the argument that if the negation truly marks the left edge of vP, it should precede the objects, I do not understand the mechanism that regulates the linear order of the specifiers. In theory, it should be possible for the DO to “tuck in” below the negation, creating the word order IO–NEG–DO–SUBJ, a word order that does not exist in Scandinavian (unless the subject has been heavy NP shifted). It does, however, seem that the order is always fixed. Note, for instance, that negative shift in Swedish induces a freezing effect on double object shift (Ken Ramshøj Christensen, personal communication). If the IO is negative in Swedish, the only possible order is the one in 17a; that is, IO > DO. Non-parallel object shift in the presence of a negative object, as in 17b, is ungrammatical. (17) a. Jag gav honom intet ofta I gave him nothing often ‘I didn’t give him anything often.’ b. *Jag I
gav gave
intet nothing
honom him
ofta often
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The usual assumption (see Koch Christensen 1991; Christensen 2003a,b,c, and references there) is that the negative object in Scandinavian occupies the same position as the sentential negation, which evidently shows that object shift must target a position above negation, and not below it (otherwise examples such as 17b could be grammatical in Scandinavian). It therefore seems to me that some extra assumptions are needed to regulate the linear order of the specifiers. Alternatively, and perhaps also desirably, object shift should be accounted for by means other than multiple specifiers. In spite of the problems I have touched upon here, Anagnostopoulou’s study is an extremely important contribution to the understanding of the double object construction. In addition, the book is very interesting because it raises important questions about the theoretical make-up of the Minimalist Program. This book should not only be recommended to those who are interested in the syntax of ditransitives, but to all linguists; not least because it is a showcase of what solid and thorough argumentation should look like. I really enjoyed reading this book. REFERENCES Baker, Mark. C. 2001. The atoms of language: The mind’s hidden rules of grammar. New York: Basic Books. Boeckx, Cedric 2004. Review of The syntax of ditransitives: Evidence from clitics, by Elena Anagnostopoulou 2003. Journal of Linguistics 40.149–153. Bonet, Eulàlia 1991. Morphology after syntax: Pronominal clitics in Romance languages. Doctoral dissertation, MIT. Bonet, Eulàlia 1994. The person-case constraint: A morphological approach. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 22: The morphology-syntax connection, 33–52. Chomsky, Noam 1995. The minimalist program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chomsky, Noam 2000. Minimalist inquiries: The framework. Step by step, ed. by Roger Martin, David Michaels and Juan Uriagereka, 89–155. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chomsky, Noam 2001. Derivation by phase. Ken Hale: A life in language, ed. by Michael Kenstowicz, 1–52. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Christensen, Ken Ramshøj. 2003a. NEG-shift and repair strategies: Pied piping vs. preposition stranding. Unpublished ms., University of Aarhus. Christensen, Ken Ramshøj. 2003b. NEG-shift in the Scandinavian languages and English. Unpublished ms., University of Aarhus.
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Christensen, Ken Ramshøj. 2003c. On the synchronic and diachronic status of the negative adverbial ikke ‘not’. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 72. 1–53. Collins, Chris and Höskuldur Thráinsson. 1996. VP-internal structure and object shift in Icelandic. Linguistic Inquiry 27.391–444. D’Alessandro, Roberta, A. G. 2003. Impersonal si constructions: Agreement and interpretation. Doctoral dissertation, University of Stuttgart. Falk, Cecilia 1990. On double object constructions. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 46.53–100. Holmberg, Anders 1991. On the Scandinavian double object construction. Papers from the 12th Scandinavian conference of linguistics, 141–155. Reykjavík: Institute of Linguistics, University of Iceland. Holmberg, Anders and Christer Platzack. 1995. The role of inflection in Scandinavian syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holmberg, Anders and Thorbjörg Hróarsdóttir. 2003. Agreement and movement in Icelandic raising constructions. Lingua 113.997–1019. (Republished as Holmberg and Hróarsdóttir 2004.) Holmberg, Anders and Thorbjörg Hróarsdóttir. 2004. Agreement and movement in Icelandic raising constructions. Lingua 114.651–673. Hrafnbjargarson, Gunnar Hrafn 2004. Oblique subjects and stylistic fronting in the history of Scandinavian and English: The role of IP-Spec. Doctoral dissertation, University of Aarhus. Kayne, Richard 1975. French syntax: The transformational cycle. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Koch Christensen, Kirsti 1991. AGR, adjunction, and the structure of Scandinavian existential sentences. Lingua 84.137–158. Marantz, Alec 1993. Implications of asymmetries in double object constructions. Theoretical aspects of Bantu grammar, ed. by Sam A. Mchombo, 113–150. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. Perlmutter, David M. 1971. Deep and surface structure constraints in syntax. New York: Rinehart and Winston Inc. Sigursson, Halldór Ármann 1989. Verbal syntax and case in Icelandic. Doctoral dissertation, Lund University. Sigursson, Halldór Ármann 1996. Icelandic finite verb agreement. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 57.1–46.
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The Text Laboratory Department of Linguistics University of Oslo P.O.Box 1102 Blindern 0317 Oslo Norway [
[email protected]]
Morphological Change Up Close. Two and a Half Centuries of Verbal Inflection in Nuremberg. By David Fertig. (Linguistische Arbeiten, 422.) Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2000. Pp. ix, 179. Paper. 52. Reviewed by BRIAN D. JOSEPH, The Ohio State University There are (at least) two types of data-oriented linguists: those who go for data across lots of languages and those who go for lots of data within a single language. David Fertig is clearly a linguist of the second type, as he has put together a masterful and painstakingly detailed study of verbal inflection in the German dialect of Nuremberg in the period between 1356 and 1619, thus based on data which Fertig characterizes as “drawn from a single local variety of a single language” (p. 1). The data for this study come from a collection of texts Fertig assembled consisting of letters, journals, diaries, reports, treatises, bookkeeping records, and protocols, and for all of the items included, a fairly accurate dating was possible, as was the identification of the author. While Fertig gives a remarkably in-depth description of verbal inflection in his well-defined corpus, his goals are not (merely) descriptive in nature. In fact, as he states his aims, they are “to build a theoretical investigation of morphological change on a solid empirical foundation” (p. 1). Clearly, as the above account of the corpus indicates, the empirical foundation he works with is solid, and then some! Fertig is aware of the fact that one can sometimes drown, as it were, in too much data (see on this point Lass 1997, who, as Klein (1999:88–89) puts it, seems to believe that “despite our interest in taking into account as much data as possible in applying the comparative method, too much data can sometimes be a hindrance in that it may muddle the picture by making it
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harder to know what forms to take as input to the method.”). Yet, Fertig realizes, wisely I would say, that a rich database is perhaps the only way that the historical linguist can overcome the basic problem faced by those engaged in analyzing language history, stated by Labov (1972:100) as the need “to make the best of […] bad data—‘bad’ in the sense that it may be fragmentary, corrupted, or many times removed from the actual production of native speakers.” As a result, we are treated here to a study with an exhaustive basis—Fertig included in the database “every token of every verb that occurs in this collection of nearly one-half million words, about 86,000 tokens in all” (p. 1)—and with a foundation like this, it is fair to say that any theoretical conclusions Fertig reaches inspire confidence. After two brief introductory chapters about the overall goals and the nature of the corpus, Fertig lays out in chapter 3 his views about language change and especially morphological change. This chapter is well thought out, and contains some provocative and downright iconoclastic ideas. Rejecting the semiotic principle of “one-form-to-onemeaning” as a viable principle of morphology, Fertig argues for the SEPARATION HYPOTHESIS and suggests that “indirect, conditional, nonone-to-one mapping between function (or meaning) and form is [to be] regarded as normal and expected in morphology” (p. 16). He goes on to take issue with the importance that some (see, for example, Bybee 1985) have placed on diagrammatic iconicity (involving the extent to which fusion of a stem with an inflectional marker reflects the relative semantic relevance of each piece to the lexical item’s meaning, to dispute the rareness of exaptation (Lass 1990’s term for the reuse of linguistic “detruitus” by speakers in novel yet rational ways), to reassess the relationship of analogy and rules, and to emend the definition of paradigm leveling to “the paradigm-internally motivated elimination of an allomorphic stem alternation” (p. 32). This last point is especially important since, as he notes (p. 31), “a very high proportion of the changes in verbal inflection observable in the Nuremberg texts involve [sic] what is traditionally referred to as analogical or paradigm(atic) leveling.” He also recognizes the importance of blends and hypercorrection (which he sees as “a kind of analogical development”, p. 37) for the data in his corpus, but is doubtful about traditional typologies of analogical change.
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At this point in the book Fertig takes me to task for my lumping “all types of ‘change due to the influence of one form on another’ […] together under the heading ‘analogy’” (in Joseph 1998:362), saying that such “a practice […] has led to the frequent criticism of analogy as a ‘catchall’ term for processes that do not really have anything interesting in common” (p. 36). Let me offer, as a brief excursus, the following defense of my approach. My claim is that various changes, including such traditionally recognized phenomena as paradigm leveling, formclass (external) analogy, contamination (blending), re-compounding (renewal), reanalysis, and even folk etymology, do have much in common. For example, they are typically sporadic (as opposed to the regularity of sound change), typically show the involvement of some other form and a perceived relation to that other form (whereas sound change is impervious to such perceived relations), and typically are embedded in some grammatical subsystem of the language (whereas sound change is blind to grammatical involvement). We might add as well that these characteristics show these changes to have a psychological/cognitive grounding, whereas sound change can be seen as strictly phonetic and physiological in nature. This approach may indeed represent the defining of analogy “negatively as whatever is not sound change, semantic change, or borrowing,” a practice Fertig is clearly not impressed by, but so be it—to me, these characteristics represent valid properties of this otherwise disparate assortment of changes and show how they cohere as a group as opposed to other classes of changes with their own motivating factors (such as physiological ones, in the case of sound change, or social ones, as in the case of borrowing and diffusion more generally). To return to Fertig’s study, chapters 4 through 7 constitute the core of the presentation and analysis of the data. Chapter 4 offers first a detailed look at the inflectional endings, organized by person and number, with a special section on the 1st and 3rd plural forms of the present of sein ‘be’, whereas chapter 5 treats stem alternations. In this latter chapter, the organizing principle is essentially strong versus weak verbs, with a separate treatment of the modals, wissen ‘know’ and tun ‘do’, with discussion of stem-final consonant alternations as well (for instance, Verner’s Law alternations). The theoretical point to be drawn from chapter 5 has to do with directionality in leveling, and Fertig finds that the notions of “local markedness and relative token frequency”
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(espoused, among others, by Tiersma 1982 and Bybee 1994) do “not appear to be applicable to the cases of leveling in verbal morphology” seen in the Nuremberg corpus (p. 107). Chapter 6 examines shifts that some verbs show between inflectional classes, a phenomenon that provides an interesting test—and to some extent confirmation—of the theory of inflectional class stability advocated by Wurzel (1984) wherein the importance of the stem vowel in determining inflectional class membership was stressed. Chapter 7 focuses on the ge- participial prefix, clarifying, among other things, some aspects of the absence of this prefix where it might otherwise be expected. In his concluding chapter, Fertig makes an important nod in the direction of sociolinguistics and variation and how change is to be understood in this context. Given the acuity of his remarks throughout the book, and the general reasonableness of what he says in this chapter, with its reference to usage differences seen in “the opposition between the chancery and administrators, on the one hand, and the women, on the other” (p. 144), one can only regret that this chapter is so short, a mere four and a half pages! Healthy iconoclasm is found here too, as Fertig concludes, following Labov 1989, that while there is a relation between variation and change, “the earlier view equating variation with change in progress is now obsolete” (p. 147). This work is clearly written and very cleanly produced, with only a few typographical errors at most. There is no index—a minor failing— but Fertig does include an extensive (17-page!) bibliography, and three appendices, one a ten-page verb frequency list giving the frequency of occurrence for every verb in the corpus (not surprisingly, sein ‘be’ and haben ‘have’ are the two most common, followed by werden ‘become’ wollen ‘want’, sollen ‘ought to’, lassen ‘let’, kommen ‘come’, tun ‘do’, and schreiben ‘write’, to round out the top ten), one a two-page sampling of lines from his data tables, and the last a two-page listing of sources for the texts in his collection. All in all, this is a most satisfying contribution to our understanding both of the development of German verbal inflection and of the nature of morphological change. Despite the appeal of broad cross-linguistic surveys, real progress in our field is made, I would say, with fine-grained exhaustive studies of the sort that this excellent and provocative work represents.
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REFERENCES Bybee, Joan. 1985. Morphology. A study of the relation between meaning and form. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bybee, Joan. 1994. Morphological universals and change. The encyclopedia of language and linguistics, vol. 5, ed. by R. E. Asher and J. M. Y. Simpson, 2557–2562. New York: Pergamon. Joseph, Brian D. 1998. Diachronic morphology. The handbook of morphology, ed. by Andrew Spencer and Arnold M. Zwicky, 351–373. Oxford: Blackwell. Klein, Jared S. 1999. Theory vs. practice in diachronic linguistics. Review of Historical linguistics and language change, by Roger Lass 1997. Language Sciences 21.87–104. Labov, William. 1972. Some principles of linguistic methodology. Language in Society 1.97–120. Labov, William. 1989. The child as linguistic historian. Language Variation and Change 1.85–97. Lass, Roger. 1990. How to do things with junk: Exaptation in language evolution. Journal of Linguistics 26.79–102. Lass, Roger. 1997. Historical linguistics and language change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tiersma, Peter. 1982. Local and general markedness. Language 58.832–849. Wurzel, Wolfgang Ullrich. 1984. Flexionsmorphologie und Natürlichkeit. Berlin: Akademie.
Department of Linguistics 222 Oxley Hall The Ohio State University Columbus, OH 43210-1298 USA [
[email protected]]
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Clausal Syntax of German. By Judith Berman. Stanford: CSLI Publications, 2003. Pp. iii, 187. Paper. $25.00. Reviewed by ANNIE ZAENEN, Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) This monograph discusses some of the major problems in German syntax from the Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) perspective codified in Bresnan 2001. Although there are some LFG papers that discuss phenomena in German syntax and there is an older introduction by Berman and Frank (1996), there was until now no book-length work in the LFG framework that focuses uniquely on the syntax of German. This work, although still a rather slender volume, changes this state of affairs. After an introduction to LFG based on Bresnan 2001 the book provides a treatment of some often, and some less, discussed phenomena and spells out their relevance to LFG theory. Chapter 3 (the first substantial one) translates the topological model of German sentence structure into a phrase structure model with functional projections, and centers on the problem of whether German has an IP along with a CP. Following mainly arguments given by Haider (1991, 1997), Berman adopts a non-IP analysis. She also follows Haider in proposing a flat structure for the clause final verbal complex. In the course of this chapter, Berman assumes, without much discussion, that German follows the endocentric mapping principles of Bresnan 2001 for the projections of C. This means that she assumes that these German c-to-f-structure mappings are configurational. For the projections of V, she also proposes several levels of VP embedding, but does not clearly say which role they play, because she proposes that the grammatical functions in the middle field are identified through lexicocentric function specification (case marking). Various levels of VPs in the middle field are often proposed in GB to account for the different partial VP-fronting possibilities, but LFG does not need this device. Chapter 4 argues that although German has no subject position it requires a subject function in every sentence. Given the obvious absence of overt subjects in several types of German sentences, that point of view needs to be supported. Berman adapts to LFG a proposal made in GB, namely that the 3rd person marking on the tensed verb in ostensibly subjectless sentences constitutes the subject. In zu-infinitives with anaphoric control, the subject function with a “PRO” value is introduced
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by a functional equation on the zu and in clauses with functional control via the functional control itself. As the discussion shows, the LFG machinery makes it very easy to introduce categories in the functional structure that do not have a corresponding c-structure. This makes clear arguments for such categories desirable. Berman shows that her proposals can be made work. However, she does not show that they solve any problems, such as the occurrence of nominative phrases in infinitives (for example, einer nach dem anderen ‘one after the other’), in a more elegant or economic way than other alternatives. Still, following GB tradition, she tries to link her treatment of verbal inflection as introducing a subject to a typology of languages with and without overt subjects. She contrasts Scandinavian languages without verb agreement with German to account for the obligatoriness of overt subjects in the former. However, she also classifies Dutch as a language with obligatory overt subjects; but it is well known that this is the wrong generalization for the majority dialect, where the expletive is optional. Moreover, it creates a problem for her account, as the morphology of Dutch is rich enough to allow the subject to be absent in the c-structure. Of course, the optionality of the Dutch expletive also creates a problem for the proposal advocated. Chapters 5 is likely the most interesting for readers focusing on LFG theory rather than on German syntax because it discusses the introduction of empty c-structure categories (traces), a relative novelty in the theory. Berman follows Bresnan 2001 in proposing a limited set of empty c-structure categories in LFG on the basis of a study of weak crossover phenomena. The arguments follow Bresnan 2001 rather closely for long distance crossover (Bresnan’s account in turn is based in part on an earlier paper by Berman). The account relies on empty cstructure categories to handle contrasts such as that between 1 and 2. (1)
Who said that he consoled his mother?
(2)
a. *Wen sagte seine Mutter habe who said his mother have
sie she
getröstet? consoled
b. *Who did his mother say that she consoled? The argument is based on the assumption that one needs to refer to linear order to state the exact conditions on the grammaticality of such
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crossover configurations. Bresnan (2001) motivates the need for empty categories in long distance dependencies by the mapping principles from c-to-f-structure, which state that in languages such as English, GF are mapped from configurationally identified c-structures. Berman assumes the same account for German. Berman accounts for the difference in grammaticality between German and English sentences, such as those found in 3, by assuming a different status for German local subjects and local topicalization: they are in the domain of lexicocentric function specification (identification through case marking). (3) a. … dass that
seine Mutter jeder mag. his mother everyone likes
b. Seine Mutter mag jeder. his mother likes everyone. c. *His mother everyone likes. The proposal then assumes that there needs to be a trace in the German middle field to account for long distance crossover, but given the lack of crossover effects within the middle field it can be anywhere. The contrast between English and German with respect to object crossover is covered by some not very well-worked out but not implausible assumptions about constraints on argument structure. Berman discusses the counterproposal of Dalrymple et al. 2001 that does not require traces, but rejects it because it does not rely on the endrocentric mapping principles and the morphological function specification proposed in Bresnan 2001. It seems rather frivolous to accept a major revision of the theory and the whole philosophy of LFG without discussing in detail exactly what damage the Dalrymple et al. 2001 proposal does to the architecture of the c-structure to f-structure mappings. As far as I know, the long distance crossover facts are the only argument for traces in German (and any other language). One cannot reject a counter analysis by simply saying that it would contradict assumptions that are made only to make one’s own analysis possible. The assumption that German is an endocentric (configurational) language in the relevant aspects, and the c-to-f-structure mapping principles defined in Bresnan 2001 make it impossible to account for
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long distance dependencies without traces, and this is the path that Berman follows without further discussion in chapter 6. In light of these assumptions, she discusses both a functional uncertainty and a cyclic approach with iterating local dependencies without adducing data that would clearly favor one over another. In chapter 7, “Distribution of Sentential Subjects”, Berman defends two claims: that all embedded tensed clauses in German are at the periphery (left-dislocated or extraposed), and that clauses have the same grammatical functions as nominal arguments, so that one can dispense with the COMP function. I find this chapter rather badly organized and do not understand very well what these two claims have to do with each other. What follows is my best attempt to make sense of it. The claim that sentential arguments have the same grammatical functions as nominal ones is based on a reconsideration of arguments presented in Dalrymple and Lødrop 2000, who propose a mixed analysis where some clauses are COMPs and others are OBJs. Berman argues that some of their arguments rest on the wrong examples, and that when the right examples are chosen it can be argued that that-clauses in German can be OBJs or OBLs, and that none need to be assumed to be COMPs. An argument in favor of COMP-clauses given in Dalrymple and Lødrup 2000 is based on the contrast between 4 and 5. (4) Dass die Erde rund ist, (das) hat that the earth round is that has ‘That the earth is round surprised him.’ (5)
ihn gewundert. him surprised
Dass die Erde rund ist, *(darüber) hat sie sich gewundert. that the earth round is *it-about has she herself surprised. ‘That the earth is round, she was surprised about that’
The assumption here is that OBJs can be topicalized, whereas COMPs cannot. Berman proposes to reanalyze apparent sentential topicalization as left-dislocation with deletion of the resumptive pronoun, which is seen as a case of topic drop. As Berman observes, this analysis is an LFG adaptation of an analysis proposed for Dutch by Koster (1978) and for German by Oppenrieder (1991). As topic drop is only possible with subjects and (accusative) objects, it accounts for the contrasts above.
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Note, however, that this treatment of “topicalized” that-clauses does not require the assumed function assignment: left-dislocated elements are not assumed to have the same function as the element that they are anaphorically connected to. In fact they are generally assumed to have only a discourse function and no subcategorized one.1 This, of course, is no argument against the proposed analysis, only against the way the argument is structured. Things become more puzzling if one looks at the second position where that-clauses can occur: extraposed in the Nachfeld. This is a position where nominal elements cannot occur. As sentences are not morphologically marked, we need to develop new positions to identify them. Berman proposes to right adjoin them to the VP. However, again this is not a position for other subcategorized arguments, so it does not jibe with the proposal that that-clauses have the same function as nominal arguments. Here I would rather argue that this is an argument against this proposal, as maintaining it weakens the mapping theory. What then are the arguments in favor of OBJ and OBL function? They are the ones developed in Dalrymple and Lødrop 2000: alternation with a nominal object, passivization, and coordination. However, passive sentences can be analyzed as involving topicalization/left-dislocation as above. Alternations have to be allowed in general, so the main argument is coordination. Here Berman makes the interesting observation that the (a) versions of the following sentences are grammatical, whereas the (b) versions are not. (6) a. Ich informierte ihn über die Situation I informed him about the situation und dass and that
Hans krank Hans sick
ist. is
‘I informed him about the situation and that Hans is sick.’
1
The structure that Berman proposes for “topicalized” that-clauses might be closer to that of contrastive dislocation construction as described in Thráinsson 1979, Zaenen 1997 and Grohmann 2000 for German, but that type of construction is not discussed anywhere.
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b. *Ich informierte ihn, dass Hans krank ist I informed him that Hans sick is und über and over
die Situation. the situation
(7) a. Er vergass die Verabredung und dass es wichtig war, he forgot the appointment and that it important was pünklich on-time
zu sein. to be
‘He forgot the appointment and that it was important to be on time.’ b. *Er he
vergass dass es wichtig war, pünklich zu sein forgot that it important was on-time to be
und die Verabredung. and the appointment However, she does not propose an analysis of this contrast. She suggests that the sentence final versions can be assumed to be extraposed, but if that is the case this would be the first clear violation of the coordinated constituent constraint, and if we are to assume null pronouns in the second constituent of the grammatical clauses it would be nice to have some arguments for them. To summarize: left-dislocated clauses do not need an OBJ or OBL function, extraposed ones do not pattern with nominal OBJs or OBLs, and so are no argument for a similarity in function. The contrasts in 6 and 7 might form the basis for an argument if identity of function is required for coordination, but they remain unexplained under the analysis given. The last substantial chapter discusses the occurrence of es with finite clauses. It is too complex to summarize, as it relies on six interacting assumptions, only one of which is specific to this discussion. It is a rather satisfying demonstration of the power of the framework developed in the previous chapters. The book ends with a summary and a list of some open problems.
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Overall, Clausal Syntax of German is a more than competent analysis of some major problems in German syntax in the LFG framework. From the discussion above, it is most likely clear that its main quality is not originality, which is not surprising given that this is a reworked doctoral dissertation. The lack of originality is potentially positive because specialists in German syntax could read the book to familiarize themselves with LFG, as it allows one to see clearly what is common to previous analyses and what is specific to LFG. Most of the discussion is clear and coherent, adapted ideas are correctly attributed to their original authors, and problems are clearly flagged. Together with Bresnan 2001, this work constitutes an excellent source for anyone who wants to teach an introduction to LFG with German data. REFERENCES Berman, Judith and Anette Frank. 1996. Deutsche and Französische Syntax im Formalismus der LFG. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Bresnan, Joan. 2001. Lexical-functional syntax. Oxford: Blackwell. Dalrymple, Mary and Helge Lødrup. 2000. The grammatical functions of complement clauses. Proceedings of the LFG ’00 conference, ed. by Miriam Butt and Tracy H. King, 82–103. http://www-csli.stanford.edu/publications/ LFG/5/lfg00.html. Dalrymple, Mary, Ron Kaplan, and Tracy H. King. 2001. Weak crossover and the absence of traces. Proceedings of the LFG ’01 conference. ed. by Miriam Butt and Tracy H. King, 66–82. http://www-csli.stanford.edu/publications/ LFG/6/lfg01.html. Grohmann, Kleanthes. 2000. Copy left dislocation. Proceedings of the 19th West Coast conference on formal linguistics, ed. by Roger Billerey and Danielle Lillehaugen. 139–152. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. Haider, Hubert. 1991 Fakultativ kohärente Infinitkonstruktionen im Deutschen. Technical Report 17, Universität Stuttgart. Haider, Hubert. 1997. Projective economy: On the minimal functional structure of the German clause. German: Syntactic problems – problematic syntax, ed. by Werner Abraham and Elly van Gelderen. 83–103, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Koster, Jan. 1978. Why subject sentences don’t exist. Recent transformational studies in European languages, ed. by Samuel J. Keyser. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Oppenrieder, Wilhelm. 1991. Von Subjekten, Sätzen und Subjektsätzen. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.
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Thráinsson, Höskuldur. 1979. On complementation in Icelandic. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Cambridge/New York: Garland Publishers. Zaenen, Annie. 1997. Contrastive dislocation in Dutch and Icelandic. Materials on left dislocation, ed. by Elena Anagnostopoulou, Henk van Riemsdijk, and Frans Zwarts. 119–148, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Annie Zaenen Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) 3333, Coyote Hill Road Palo Alto, CA 94304 USA [
[email protected]]
Journal of Germanic Linguistics 17.1 (2005):39–75
REVIEWS
Prolific Domains: On the Anti-Locality of Movement Dependencies. By Kleanthes K. Grohmann. (Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 66). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2003. Pp. xiv, 369. Hardcover. $138.00. Reviewed by JUSTIN M. FITZPATRICK, Massachusetts Institute of Technology This monograph consists of a revision of the author’s doctoral dissertation, with the addition of extensions and related work by the author and collaborators. In this work Grohmann makes the interesting suggestion that along with STANDARD LOCALITY (the familiar upper bound on the length of syntactic dependencies), movement dependencies are subject to a lower bound, that is, ANTI-LOCALITY. This suggestion is implemented through a partition of the clause into three parts (roughly the theta-domain, the agreement domain, and the left periphery) and some simple conditions on movement between and within these domains. The result is a new candidate proposal in the realm of multiple/cyclic spell-out theories that provides a novel analysis of anaphora in several domains, as well as of left dislocation of various types. Although the proposal also has interesting theoretical implications (for example, a less stipulative ban on “improper movement”), it suffers from some empirical and theoretical shortcomings, which I will outline below. The Anti-Locality thesis introduced in chapter 1 is implemented through the theory of PROLIFIC DOMAINS. According to this theory, the clause consists of three parts, or domains, defined over familiar syntactic categories: (1) the -domain, in which -roles are discharged/assigned/ checked (material at and below the vP level), (2) the -domain, where agreement/-features are checked (material above the vP level including agreement projections (Agr), tense, and aspect), and (3) the -domain, the location of syntactically represented discourse roles, such as topic and focus (a finely articulated left periphery along the lines of Rizzi 1997). Anti-Locality states that movement cannot take place within a single Prolific Domain. To some extent, Anti-Locality could be viewed as a response to critics of the line of research that seeks to explain syntactic dependencies © Society for Germanic Linguistics
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in terms of movement rather than construal, chains, or accidental binding (Hornstein 2001, Kayne 2002, among others). Since Hornstein (2001) makes crucial use of movement to -position, critics might ask why, if such movement is allowed, we do not observe sentences such as 1a with the meaning of 1b, given the possibility of the movement operation in 1c where John is merged as theme and moves to the external argument position. (1) a. *John likes. b. John likes himself. c. [vP John v [VP likes
]]
The Anti-Locality framework provides a principled answer. Movement within a single Prolific Domain (in 1, movement from one theta position to another within the same VP) is too local. If independent evidence for Anti-Locality could be found, this critique of movement into theta position would then disappear. This book attempts to provide such evidence. However, it should be noted that were Hornstein to be wrong, much of Grohmann’s proposal would still be tenable. In chapter 2 the following is introduced as an explicit Anti-Locality condition: Condition on Domain Exclusivity (CDE) (p. 78) For a given Prolific Domain , an object O in the phrase-marker must receive an exclusive interpretation at the interfaces, unless duplicity of O yields a drastic effect on the output of . Putting aside for the moment what “duplicity” and “drastic” mean, the CDE essentially states that a given object can only appear once in a Prolific Domain. Grohmann attempts to explain this restriction as a ban on ambiguity at the PF interface. A phonological form for a given Prolific Domain must contain unambiguous instructions. If an object appears twice in the domain, as it would if it moves domain-internally, ambiguity arises. However, there is one way to circumvent the ban on domain-internal movement imposed by the CDE: an object can appear more than once in a Prolific Domain if one copy of the object is pronounced differently from the other. Grohmann calls this escape hatch
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COPY SPELL-OUT.
41
This is, presumably, what is meant by the vague “drastic effect” condition above. While there is an intuitively appealing aspect to Prolific Domains and the CDE, Grohmann’s explanation of the CDE in terms of a PF ban on duplicate spell-out suffers somewhat from his adoption of Nunes’ (1995) approach to copy theory and deletion. Nunes argues that, due to the Linear Correspondence Axiom (Kayne 1994), only one copy of a given syntactic object can be spelled out phonologically. Other copies, formed through movement (envisioned as copy+merger), must be deleted. Lower copies are generally deleted since they contain more unchecked features. But if copies can be deleted, it should be simple to circumvent the CDE and allow all sorts of domain-internal movement, as long as all copies (but one) are deleted. Grohmann addresses this concern to some extent by saying that unpronounced copies are not deleted, but ignored. This is presumably due to a spell-out algorithm (unspecified in the monograph) that determines for a given domain where a given phrase with multiple occurrences is spelled out. If this is true, then the adoption of Nunes’s approach to copy theory and deletion is only a hindrance. Grohmann’s work could be done by a simple remerger account of movement, without the problems introduced by a copy operation and subsequent deletion. Chapter 2 spells out the architecture of the system within which the Anti-Locality thesis is couched. The introductory material in the first two chapters might have benefited from additional editorial attention, as it may be vague and confusing at times. As such, it will be difficult to follow for readers not already familiar with recent work in minimalism. In fact, some of this material could have been omitted without affecting the book’s main proposals, although some material in chapter 2 becomes crucial later in the book. First, Grohmann argues against Chomsky’s (1995) proposal that little v is the locus of both external argument licensing and accusative case marking. Grohmann wishes to divorce the former, which is part of the -domain, from the latter, which is a related property. Second, Grohmann argues against the existence of multiple specifiers. The clausal architecture assumed here allows a single specifier for a given XP (formed either through direct merger or movement) and any number of adjuncts, which appear above the specifier and can only be formed through (external) merger. This approach to specifiers and adjuncts allows an account of certain facts
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about left dislocation addressed later in the book. However, when this issue is discussed, the reader is left wondering why one would wish to rule out multiple specifiers. Unsupported statements, such as “multiple specifiers are undesirable, do not buy us much empirically, and can be banned from the grammar” (p. 53) are even more puzzling, especially given much recent work on multiple specifiers (see, for example, Richards 1999). Following Chomsky (2000:116), Grohmann attempts to derive fundamental specifier-head, head-head, and head-complement relations through the use of what he calls the “Natural Relations” provided by merger. However, this attempt does not quite go through. While Grohmann is correct that the combination of SISTER and IMMEDIATELYCONTAIN, two relations that arguably fall out from the operation Merge, provides a natural account of the specifier-head relation, this same relation should hold between a head and the specifier of that head’s complement. Therefore, while Grohmann’s approach includes the SpecHead relation, it might be too permissive. Grohmann also argues for a greed-based over an attraction-based treatment of movement based on these relations. The SpecHead relation, viewed as ImmediatelyContain(Sister-Of (XP)), fits into a greed-based framework since it is the XP in the specifier position that checks features on the head, not the other way around. However, this deduction seems spurious to me. It is based on the assumption that the MotherDaughter relation (Immediately-Contain()) is fundamental, but the DaughterMother relation (Mother()) is not. Furthermore, the discussion is open to Chametsky’s (2003:200–201) critique that more “natural relations” are definable from these assumptions than are needed. Chapters 3 through 6 form the empirical core of the book. Chapter 3 presents a treatment of local anaphora as the result of too-local movement within the -domain, with Copy Spell-out of the lower trace as an anaphor, as in 2, where Copy Spell-out is shown as (X). (2)
[vP John v [VP likes John ( himself)]
This analysis is only available if movement to a theta position is possible, as it is in a system where theta roles are treated as features to be checked through merger or movement. This treatment of anaphora serves
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as a proof-of-concept of the CDE and Copy Spell-out in the -domain. It differs from other movement-based analyses of binding (see, for instance, Kayne 2002) in that the anaphor is not present prior to Copy Spell-out. In this chapter, anaphora in exceptional case marking contexts are also treated through Copy Spell-out, but in the -domain. The PF explanation of the CDE is challenged further if an analogous analysis applies to sentences that contain multiple anaphora, as in John is protecting himself from himself. Here one would expect the CDE to rule out multiple Copy Spell-out of John as himself. Grohmann acknowledges this problem, but provides no clear solution. Chapter 4 contains perhaps the most interesting empirical case study of the CDE and Copy Spell-out, namely that of left dislocation, including topicalization as in 3a, contrastive left dislocation (CLD) as in 3b, clitic left dislocation (CLLD) as in 3c, and two types of hanging topic left dislocation (HTLD), shown in 3d,e. (3) a. Diesen Mann mag ich this man know I ‘This man, I don’t know.’ b. Den Martin, den the Martin D-PRON
nicht. not
habe ich schon lange have I already long
German
German
nicht mehr gesehen. not anymore seen ‘Martin, I haven’t seen [him] in a long time.’ c. [Afton ton andra], dhen ton ksero. this the man not CLITIC know.1SG ‘This man, I don’t know [him].’ d. [Diese-r/-n Mann]—den/ihn habe ich this man PRON have I noch nie gesehen. yet never seen ‘This man, I’ve never seen him before.’
Greek
German
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e. [Diese-r/-n Mann]—ich habe this man I have
den/ihn
German
PRON
noch nie gesehen. yet never seen ‘This man, I’ve never seen him before.’ According to Grohmann, topicalization, CLD, and CLLD suggest that the left-dislocated XP is derived through movement from a clause internal position, while this is not true of HTLD. Evidence for this, some of it well-known, includes Case connectivity and reconstruction effects (binding of anaphora, bound variable readings, obviation of weak crossover) in the first three, but not in HTLD. Turning to CLD, we can ask how the left-dislocated XP could be moved from a clause-internal position when the resumptive pronoun (RP) is in the prototypical preverbal topic position, presumably moved from a clause-internal position. Grohmann suggests that the RP is the result of Copy Spell-out of a lower occurrence of XP within the -domain, as shown in 4. (4)
[CP XP [TopP XP (RP) V-Top0 [IP …XP… [vP …XP…]]]]
Here the dislocated XP moves to topic position (within the left-peripheral -domain), and then moves on to a “quasi-extra-sentential” CP projection. While it is not clear what this CP projection is, this movement is too local and only Copy Spell-out can make the derivation legitimate by the CDE. The assumptions regarding specifiers and adjuncts from chapter 2 allow an account of the ordering among HTLDed and CLDed XPs, where the former always appear to the left of the latter. One appealing aspect of Grohmann’s analysis of the demonstrative pronoun in CLD as the spell-out of a copy due to Anti-Locality is that resumptive pronouns now appear when standard (maximum-distance) locality is violated, as with islands for movement, and also when Anti-Locality is violated. This treatment of CLD might also provide an argument against chain formation as a plausible alternative to movement. In this case, one would have to posit a difference between chains in CLD and coreference (presumably also encoded with coindexation) in HTLD. Chapter 5 returns to CLLD and analyzes this phenomenon as Copy Spell-out in the -domain. Grohmann suggests that the CLLDed XP
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moves through two positions in an Agreement projection: one adjoined to the Agr head and one in the specifier of this head. The occurrence adjoined to the Agr head is spelled out as a clitic. The XP in [Spec,AgrP] then moves on to a left-peripheral topic position. (5)
[AgrP XP [Agr XP( Clitic)–Agr0] [vP …XP…]]
This analysis of CLLD is perhaps the book’s most problematic part. First, it predicts that all languages with CLLD should have clitic doubling. There is nothing inherent in 5 that would force XP to move on to a topic position, so the derivation should be possible in any clause. However, Italian is a classic example of a language with CLLD but no clitic doubling. Furthermore, since the left-dislocated XP does undergo movement to the -domain (presumably the domain of A-bar movement), the analysis falls to Cinque’s (1990) argument that if CLLD involves A-bar movement, it should license parasitic gaps, contrary to fact. The advantage of the CLD and CLLD analyses is that they would explain several observed differences between the two, as well as moving toward an account of why and in which languages these types of left dislocation should occur. Why does Copy Spell-out emerge as an anaphor in some cases, a pronoun in others, and a clitic in still others? Grohmann comes close to explaining this distinction by appeal to different domains: anaphors arise in the -domain, clitics in the -domain (when the language has Agrrelated clitics), and pronouns in the -domain. However, the analysis of ECM anaphors as arising in the -domain makes this line of reasoning less consistent. Furthermore, the author provides no explanation for why only lower copies undergo Copy Spell-out as a pronoun/anaphor/clitic. Grohmann alludes to a possible feature-based explanation along the lines of Nunes 1995, but, as noted above, Nunes’ assumptions may be problematic for the CDE theory. Chapter 6 summarizes Grohmann and Haegeman 2003 and extends the Copy Spell-out paradigm to the DP level, where Grohmann argues that the DP contains multiple Prolific Domains (analogous to clausal structure), and that domain-internal movement within the DP also triggers Copy Spell-out. The latter is used to account for pronominal possessor doubling in Germanic, as in German dem Vater sein Auto ‘the father’s car’ (lit. the father his car). If movement (and Copy Spell-out) is
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at play here, Hornstein’s (2003) suggestion that movement does not underlie control in DPs (as in John’s attempt PRO to leave) may be at risk. Chapter 7 presents some of the most interesting ideas of the book. Grohmann reviews the long history of research into syntactic cyclicity and develops a view of cyclicity in the Prolific Domains framework in the form of two generalizations. (6) a. Inter-Clausal Movement Generalization Movement across a clause boundary can only target a position within the same Prolific Domain as the source position. b. Intra-Clausal Movement Generalization Movement within a clause always targets the next highest Prolific Domain. The combination of 6a and 6b, together with the unnoted assumption that a syntactic object must have an occurrence in each clause between the highest and lower occurrence of that object, ensure a strongly falsifiable type of cyclicity. Moving phrases always target either the next highest clause-internal domain or the same domain in next highest clause. The result is a satisfying account of so-called “improper movement” (the ban on A-bar movement followed by A-movement) without simply stipulating that this type of movement is “improper”. Grohmann adopts a MULTIPLE SPELL-OUT approach that differs in crucial ways from both Uriagereka’s (1999) and the phase-based approach put forth by Chomsky (2000). In the Prolific Domains framework, each domain— (vP), (IP), and (CP)—is submitted to PF and LF computation after it is built. Cyclicity in movement is viewed as a fundamental property of this system, not as an accidental property of intervening heads, as in theories that incorporate the EPP as a trigger for movement. The principles in 6 predict that raising verbs embedded under control verbs should behave as if they were control verbs, a prediction that Grohmann claims is born out in English. For example, in 7a John is raised clause-internally from its first theta position to the -domain, from where it raises clause-internally to the -domain of the raising verb seem. However, from here John would have to move to the -domain of the control verb hope, a move ruled out by 6b. Therefore, the derivation
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must be as in 7b, where John moves from -domain to -domain until it reaches hope. This entails that John must be an argument of seem, and so seem must behave like a control verb, a prediction Grohmann claims is born out. (7) John hopes to seem to be intelligent. a. *[ John hopes [ John to [ seem [ John to be [ John intelligent]]]]] b. [ John hopes [ to [ John seem [ to be [ John intelligent]]]]] But this prediction does not hold up cross-linguistically. Rizzi (1986) shows that a coreferential anaphor can appear between an NP and a controlled PRO, as in 8a, but not between an NP and its trace position in raising, as in 8b. (8) a. Gianni1 si1 promette di [PRO1 essere diligente]. Gianni self promises to-be diligent ‘Gianni promises himself to be diligent.’ b. *Gianni1 si1 sembra [t1 essere inteligente]. Gianni self seems to-be intelligent ‘Gianni seems to himself to be intelligent.’ The discussion of 7 suggests that when embedded under a control verb (such as sperare), raising verbs (such as sembrare) should pattern with 8a. However, as shown in 9, this is not the case.1 (9) *Gianni1 spera di sembrarsi1 inteligente. Gianni hopes to-seem to-self intelligent ‘Gianni hopes to seem to himself to be intelligent.’ Further problems arise with this strict view of cyclicity if whadjuncts in the -domain must pass through the -domain on the way to their surface -domain position. The question is what type of agreement
1
My thanks to David Pesetsky for pointing out this argument to me, and to Enzo Moscati for the Italian data.
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forces adjunct movement to the -domain since most (all?) languages lack agreement with adjuncts. As a whole, the proposals of the book are thought provoking and appealing. Grohmann does a good job of motivating his proposals independently, so Anti-Locality does not become an ad hoc patch required by Hornstein’s (2001) treatment of control as movement. However, since it adopts many of Hornstein’s assumptions, the book is open to criticism along the lines of Landau 2003 and Culicover and Jackendoff 2001. The tripartite division of the clause has intuitive appeal, and Grohmann’s treatment of cyclicity within the three-domain system provides an interesting alternative in the realm of multiple spell-out theories. It also provides a satisfying ban on improper movement. While empirical and theoretical problems remain, they are outweighed by the book’s virtues and should serve as challenges to those pursuing a theory of AntiLocality. REFERENCES Chametsky, Robert A. 2003. Phrase structure. Minimalist syntax, ed. by Randall Hendrick, 192–225. Oxford: Blackwell. Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The minimalist program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chomsky, Noam. 2000. Minimalist inquiries: The framework. Step by step, ed. by Roger Martin, David Michaels, and Juan Uriagereka, 89–156. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cinque, Guglielmo. 1990. Types of A-bar dependencies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Culicover, Peter and Ray Jackendoff. 2001. Control is not movement. Linguistic Inquiry 32.493–511. Grohmann, Kleathes and Liliane Haegeman. 2003. Resuming reflexives. Nordlyd 31. Proceedings of the19th Scandinavian conference in linguistics, ed. by Anne Dahl, Kristine Bentzen, and Peter Svenonius, 46–62. Hornstein, Norbert. 2001. Move! A minimalist theory of construal. Oxford: Blackwell. Hornstein, Norbert. 2003. On control. Minimalist syntax, ed. by Randall Hendrick, 6–81. Oxford: Blackwell. Kayne, Richard. 1994. The anti-symmetry of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kayne, Richard. 2002. Pronouns and their antecedents. Derivation and explanation in the minimalist program, ed. by Samuel David Epstein and T. Daniel Seely, 133–166. Oxford: Blackwell. Landau, Idan. 2003. Movement out of control. Linguistic Inquiry 34.471–498.
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Nunes, Jairo. 1995. The copy theory of movement and linearization of chains in the minimalist program. Doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland. Richards, Norvin. 1999. Featural cyclicity and the ordering of multiple specifiers. Working minimalism, ed. by Samual David Epstein and Norbert Hornstein, 127–158. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rizzi, Luigi. 1986. On chain formation. The syntax of pronominal clitics. Syntax and semantics, vol. 19, ed. by Hagit Borer, 65–95. New York: Academic Press. Rizzi, Luigi. 1997. The fine structure of the left periphery. Elements of grammar: Handbook of generative syntax, ed. by Liliane Haegeman, 281– 337. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Uriagereka, Juan. 1999. Multiple spell out. Working minimalism, ed. by Samuel David Epstein and Norbert Hornstein, 251–282. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. 32-D866 MIT 77 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02139 USA [
[email protected]]
The Syntax of Ditransitives: Evidence from Clitics. By Elena Anagnostopoulou. (Studies in Generative Grammar, 54). BerlinNew York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003. Pp. xiv, 379. Hardcover. $114.40. Reviewed by GUNNAR HRAFN HRAFNBJARGARSON, University of Oslo “The fundamental challenge of comparative linguistics is to find a way of doing justice to both the similarities and the differences without contradiction, without empty compromise, and without sacrificing one truth to the other” (Baker 2001:16). It is my belief that Anagnostopoulou has managed to do this in her book in such a way that it can only be admired. The topic that Anagnostopoulou has chosen is—to put it mildly—rather complex, and as to complicate things even more, Anagnostopoulou uses the entire theoretical apparatus provided by the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995), including multiple specifiers,
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“tucking in”, equidistance, minimal domains, EPP, long-distance agree, etc. (In fact, Boeckx (2004) criticizes Anagnostopoulou’s use of the whole range of theoretical apparatus.) Nevertheless, the book is very easy to read, and Anagnostopoulou’s argumentation is easy to follow. For example, it is the rule rather than the exception that she uses examples from many different languages in support of each of her claims. In this way, a reader like myself who sometimes finds it difficult to decode and understand the Greek (as well as the Romance) data, can be reassured by the fact that Anagnostopoulou usually elaborates on her claims by showing the direction the Germanic languages (Dutch, English, German and Scandinavian) choose to go. These languages sometimes follow Greek and/or Romance, and sometimes they choose an altogether different direction. Although the central focus of the book is on Greek clitic doubling and the Greek double object construction, in this review I am mainly concerned with Anagnostopoulou’s analysis of the Germanic languages, and in particular, passivization and object shift in Scandinavian and constructions with oblique (or quirky) subjects in Icelandic. First, I summarize the main theoretical claims that Anagnostopoulou makes. The book is divided into five chapters. In the first chapter, Anagnostopoulou briefly introduces the overall embracing claim of the book that a dative (the indirect object, henceforth IO) blocks movement of a lower nominative if “(i) the dative is higher than the base position of the nominative and (ii) not contained in the same domain as the nominative [...]” (p. 4). Thus, the derivation in 1 (Anagnostopoulou’s 2, p. 4) is ill-formed, whereas the derivation in 2 (Anagnostopoulou’s 3, p. 5) is well-formed because “the features of the dative move out of the way of the lower nominative [...] and thus the higher dative argument does not count anymore for locality.” (1)
[NOM [Domain DAT [Domain tNOM]]]
(2)
[NOM [DAT-Clitic [Domain tDAT-Clitic [Domain tNOM]]]] STEP I STEP II
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In the second chapter, Anagnostopoulou establishes the generalization reflected in 1 and 2 that in Greek a nominative DP may not move across a dative DP unless the dative DP is realized as a clitic or a part of a clitic doubling chain. Here too, the typology of ditransitives is investigated. Anagnostopoulou argues that two different types of double object constructions should be distinguished, based on where the IO is base-generated. According to Anagnostopoulou, an IO may either be base-generated high within the VP (only this construction qualifies as a true double object construction in Anagnostopoulou’s system) or it may be base-generated low within the VP (in which case it shows the characteristics of a prepositional dative). The crucial difference is, in Anagnostopoulou’s view (following Marantz 1993), that in addition to the main verbal root only the former (the true double object construction) contains a light applicative head (see 3). (3)
v1P SUB
v’ v-TR
v2P IO
v’ vAPPL
VP V
DO
In some languages the light applicative head (vAPPL) may assign morphological case to the IO, while in other languages it may not. vAPPL is also responsible for the different types of object shift found in the Scandinavian languages. Norwegian and Swedish differ from Danish and Icelandic in that the former allow for non-parallel object shift (that is, the order of the IO and the direct object, henceforth DO, can be reversed), whereas the latter only allow for parallel object shift. According to Anagnostopoulou, this difference is due to the fact that in Norwegian and Swedish, but not in Danish and Icelandic, vAPPL allows for an additional specifier position into which the DO can move on its way to the target position of object shift (an outer specifier of vP).
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The third chapter introduces the three “ingredients” that are needed for a locality-based account of ditransitives cross-linguistically; namely Case and the EPP, c-command, and minimal domains. In this chapter, Anagnostopoulou argues that equidistance (and not only closest ccommand) plays a crucial role in the notion of locality. For example, Amovement of derived subjects across higher goals or experiencers is ruled out in the passive when the two arguments are not in the same minimal domain, but such movement is allowed whenever the two arguments are in the same minimal domain, that is, are equidistant from the target position. In the fourth chapter, Anagnostopoulou shows how minimal link condition violations can be avoided if the dative DP is realized as a clitic, or if the dative DP is a part of a clitic doubling chain. In such constructions, movement is not ruled out because the cliticized or the clitic doubled argument is in the same minimal domain as the target of movement. In the fifth chapter, Anagnostopoulou discusses -feature checking in environments where a dative DP enters into a Move/Agree relation with T/transitive v. In particular, Anagnostopoulou discusses two types of person restrictions: the PERSON-CASE CONSTRAINT (PC-Constraint) and the PERSON RESTRICTION ON NOMINATIVE OBJECTS (PRNConstraint). The PC-Constraint is a restriction on clitics in Romance, Greek, Swiss German, Basque and many other languages (also known as the *me/lui or I-II constraint; see, for example, Perlmutter 1971, Kayne 1975, and Bonet 1991, 1994, among many others). Anagnostopoulou’s Greek examples (p. 252, 342) are found in 4. (Note that 4d is incorrectly translated in the book as they will send you to him). (4) a. Tha mu to FUT C1.GEN.1SG C1.ACC.3SG.NEUT ‘They will send it to me.’
stilune send.3PL
b. Tha su ton stilune FUT C1.GEN.2SG C1.ACC.3SG.MASC send.3PL ‘They will send him to you.’ c. *Tha to me stilune FUT C1.GEN.3SG.NEUT/MASC C1.ACC.1SG send.3PL ‘They will send me to him.’
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d. *Tha mu se stilune FUT C1.GEN.1SG C1.ACC.2SG send.3PL ‘They will send you to me.’ The PRN-Constraint is attested in Icelandic DAT-NOM constructions (that is, constructions where the subject is dative and the object is nominative), and in Italian impersonal si-constructions (compare D’Alessandro 2003). The PRN-Constraint prohibits agreement with nominative DPs in NOMINATIVE WITH INFINITIVE constructions (compare Sigursson 1989, 1996); that is, when the nominative DP is not in the same clause as the verb. The example in 5b shows that the verb can agree neither in person nor in number with the first person nominative DP. The example in 5a shows that such constructions are grammatical if the verb does not agree with the first person nominative DP. (5) a. Ykkur ótti ég /vi You.DAT.PL thought.3SG I.NOM/we.NOM ‘You found me/us amusing.’ b. *Ykkur You.DAT.SG
fyndin amusing
óttum /óttu vi fyndin thought.1PL/thought.3PL we.NOM amusing
The PRN-constraint also prohibits the occurrence of first and second person nominative objects. The example in 6 shows that nominative objects cannot be first person (the same holds for second person, but not for third person), even if the verb shows default agreement (compare Sigursson 1996 for a detailed discussion of the grammaticality of such examples; for me, they are ungrammatical). (6) *ér líkai / líkuum / líkuu vi You.DAT liked.3SG / liked.1PL / liked.3PL we.NOM Anagnostopoulou shows that although the PC-Constraint and the PRN-Constraint have many similarities, they differ in three crucial ways (p. 264). First, the PC-Constraint only holds if there is an external argument present, whereas the PRN-Constraint only holds if there is no external argument (Anagnostopoulou assumes that dative subjects are
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derived subjects, compare p. 275, tree 369).1 Second, the PC-Constraint, but not the PRN-Constraint affects weak elements, and finally, the “emergency strategies” induced by the two constraints are different. Romance and Greek “rescue” the respective construction by replacing the clitic with a strong pronoun, whereas in Icelandic the verb simply does not show agreement with the nominative DP. I turn now to what I think are the problematic aspects of Anagnostopoulou’s analysis of passivization and object shift in Scandinavian and Icelandic DAT-NOM constructions. As mentioned, the PRN-Constraint does two fairly different things at the same time. First, the PRN-Constraint regulates the agreement relationship between a verb and a nominative DP, which is not an object but the subject of a small clause. Second, the PRN-Constraint prohibits the occurrence of first/second person nominative objects. In Hrafnbjargarson 2004, I show that the PRN-Constraint can be accounted for in terms of the harmonic alignment of prominence hierarchies (person, case, and grammatical relation). The advantage of such an analysis is that the PRN-Constraint will only prohibit the occurrence of first and second person pronouns as nominative objects, whereas other constraints will regulate the impoverished agreement relationship between the verb and the nominative DP in Nominative with Infinitive constructions. Anagnostopoulou (p. 239ff.) also discusses the intervention effect of dative arguments in Icelandic. In DATIVE WITH INFINITIVE constructions, the matrix verb cannot show agreement with a nominative object in the lower clause. The example in 7 is Anagnostopoulou’s example 327. (7) Mér fannst /*fundust henni leiast Me.DAT seemed.3SG /seemed.3PL her.DAT be-bored ‘I thought she was bored with them.’
eir they.NOM
Anagnostopoulou (p. 240) also mentions that such intervention effects are not found in transitive expletive constructions where the associate of the expletive is a dative DP.
1
This assumption is rather appealing to me, as I think that it makes the correct predictions about the behavior of verbs in DAT-NOM constructions. For example, they cannot occur in the passive (as a consequence of one argument already having been promoted).
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(8) a finnast sumum börnum svona leikir skemmtilegir There seem.3PL some children.DAT such games.NOM fun ‘Some children think that such games are fun.’ Following Chomsky 2000, 2001, Anagnostopoulou assumes that the dative DP enters into an Agree relation with T (the dative DP checks person on T) and that the nominative DP checks number on T. The intervention effect can thus be explained if one assumes that the dative does not enter into an Agree relation with T in 7. Unfortunately, the data that Anagnostopoulou presents do not show the whole picture. All her examples have plural dative arguments as the associate of an expletive, but as Holmberg and Hróarsdóttir (2003:1000) show it matters whether the intervening dative is plural or singular. When the intervening dative is singular, the verb cannot show agreement with the embedded nominative (9b), whereas if the intervening dative is plural such agreement is fine (10b). (9) a. a There
fannst einhverjum found.SG some
essar ljósmyndir these photographs.NOM
manni man.DAT
ljótar ugly
‘A man found these photographs ugly.’ b. *a fundust einhverjum There found.PL some
manni man.DAT
essar ljósmyndir ljótar these photographs.NOM ugly (10) a. a fannst mörgum mönnum There found.SG many.DAT men.DAT essar these
ljósmyndir photographs.NOM
ljótar ugly
‘Many men found these photographs ugly.’
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b. a fundust mörgum mönnum there found.PL many.DAT men.DAT essar these
ljósmyndir photographs.NOM
ljótar ugly
‘Many men found these photographs ugly.’ From example 10b we cannot determine whether the verb shows agreement with the dative subject or the nominative object. However, we might conclude that the dative DP really can check number on T as well as person, and in fact there are some arguments that speak in favor of such an analysis. In my dialect, which is an obligatory agreement dialect (that is, verbs obligatorily show agreement with third person nominative objects), questions such as in 11, where the nominative element is plural and the dative subject may be interpreted as either singular or plural, have different interpretations depending on whether the verb shows default agreement or plural agreement. (11) a. Hverjum fannst ljósmyndirnar ljótar? who.DAT.SG found.SG photographs-the.NOM ugly ‘Who (which man) found these photographs ugly?’ b. Hverjum fundust ljósmyndirnar ljótar? who.DAT.PL found.PL photographs-the.NOM ugly ‘Who (or which men) found these photographs ugly?’ In 11a, where the verb shows default agreement (third person singular), the subject is interpreted as singular. In 11b, where the verb shows number agreement, the subject is interpreted as plural. As Anagnostopoulou discusses in detail, Icelandic ditransitive verbs fall into two classes. One class of verbs (gefa ‘give’, segja ‘tell’, sna ‘show’, etc.) allows symmetric passives (that is, both the IO and the DO may raise to the subject position), while the other class of verbs (skila ‘return’, svipta ‘deprive’, ræna ‘rob’, etc.) only allows asymmetric passives (that is, only the IO may raise to the subject position). Following Falk 1990, Holmberg 1991, Holmberg and Platzack 1995, and Collins and Thráinsson 1996, Anagnostopoulou assumes that the verbs in the former class have a double base: one where the goal is basegenerated above the theme (high in the VP, and thus a true double object
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construction), and another where the goal is base-generated below the theme (low in the VP, and thus corresponds to a PP-construction). As a result, with verbs like gefa ‘give’, both orders, IO > DO, and DO > IO are found. The latter word order is known as the INVERSION CONSTRUCTION. One of the characteristics of the inversion construction is that the IO must be focused or stressed, and therefore it cannot be object shifted. The examples in 12 are Anagnostopoulou’s 161, originally from Collins and Thráinsson 1996:415. In 12b, I have added the negation to show the ungrammaticality of object shift. (12) a. Hann gaf konunginum ambáttina ekki He.NOM gave king-the.DAT maidservant-the.ACC not ‘He did not give the king the maidservant.’ b. Hann gaf (ekki) ambáttina He.NOM gave (not) maidservant-the.ACC
(ekki) (not)
konunginum (*ekki) king-the.DAT (*not) *‘He did not give the maidservant the king.’ Accordingly, these verbs have symmetric passives. (13) a. Konunginum var gefin ambáttin king-the.DAT was given maidservant-the.NOM ‘The king was given the maidservant.’ b. Ambáttin var gefin konunginum Maidservant-the.NOM was given king-the.DAT *‘The maidservant was given the king.’ Verbs in the other class do not participate in the inversion construction, and therefore do not have the symmetric passive. Nevertheless, even though verbs in the former class all have the symmetric passive, not all of them seem to participate in the inversion construction. One of these verbs is lána ‘lend’. (Note that Anagnostopoulou, p. 199, example 171b, brings an example from Collins and Thráinsson 1996 that is parallel to 14c. My six informants and I do not share their grammaticality judgments.) The examples in 14 show that
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with lána ‘lend’, the IO must precede the DO even though the IO is stressed, as in 14c. (14) a. Hann lánai (ekki) bóndanum (ekki) He lent (not) farmer-the.DAT (not) grafolann stud-the.ACC
(ekki) (not)
‘He did not lend the farmer the stud.’ b. *Hann lánai (ekki) grafolann (ekki) bóndanum (ekki) He lent (not) stud-the.ACC (not) farmer-the.DAT (not) c. *Hann lánai (ekki) grafolann (ekki) bóndanum (ekki) He lent (not) stud-the.ACC (not) farmer-the.DAT (not) The examples in 15, however, show that the verb lána has a symmetric passive. In 15a, the dative goal, bóndanum ‘the farmer’, has raised to the subject position. In 15b the nominative theme, grafolinn ‘the stud’, has raised to the subject position. It is necessary to embed the passive sentences in a question to avoid V2 effects, such as the possibility of topicalization. Note also that if 15b were derived from the inversion construction, the prediction would be that the dative goal should be focused or stressed. This is not the case in either 13b or 15b. (15)
Hún vill vita … She wants know … ‘She would like to know …’
a. hvort bóndanum hafi ekki veri lánaur grafolinn whether farmer-the.DAT has not been lent stud-the.NOM ‘whether the farmer has not been lent the stud.’ b. hvort grafolinn hafi ekki veri lánaur bóndanum farmer-the.DAT whether stud-the.NOM has not been lent ‘whether the farmer has not been lent the stud.’ Apparently, in some respects the verb lána ‘lend’ behaves like verbs that do not allow the symmetric passive (because it does not occur in the inversion construction). However, in other respects it seems to behave
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like verbs that allow the symmetric passive (because both of its internal arguments may raise to the subject position). Since lána does not occur in the inversion construction, the derivation of 15b is problematic for Anagnostopoulou’s analysis. As she argues (chapter 3, section 8.2.1), vAPPL does not allow for an additional specifier in Icelandic (this also explains why Icelandic does not have non-parallel object shift as found in Norwegian and Swedish). If vAPPL allowed for an additional specifier, the nominative argument and the dative argument would be in the same minimal domain and the nominative argument could move to the outer specifier of v without violating locality conditions on Amovement. After having moved to the outer specifier of v, the nominative argument could move on to T. Since vAPPL does not allow for an additional specifier in Icelandic, the movement of the nominative argument across the dative argument in constructions such as 15b violates the MLC. Finally, let us turn to multiple specifiers and “tucking in”. I will not discuss the usual arguments against multiple specifiers; for example, that multiple specifiers pose a learnability problem as it can be difficult to figure out whether the structure is made of one projection with two specifiers or two projections with an empty head in the higher projection. Instead, I am concerned with the linear order of multiple specifiers. Anagnostopoulou assumes (following many others) that the negation and sentence medial adverbs mark the left edge of vP in Scandinavian. Object shift is then movement into an outer specifier, above the negation. If both objects in a double object construction are object shifted, the DO “tucks in” between the IO and the negation (the tree in 16 is Anagnostopoulou’s example 234, p. 155; I have added the negation). First, the IO moves to an outer specifier of v1P. Since the IO does not intervene anymore, the DO can object shift and “tuck in” below the IO.
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(16)
v1P
IO
v1P DO
v1P NEG
v1P Subj
v’ v-TR
v2P tIO
v’ vAPPL V
VP tDO
The negation occupies an extra specifier between the specifier into which the DO has been shifted and the specifier in which the subject is base-generated. Putting aside the argument that if the negation truly marks the left edge of vP, it should precede the objects, I do not understand the mechanism that regulates the linear order of the specifiers. In theory, it should be possible for the DO to “tuck in” below the negation, creating the word order IO–NEG–DO–SUBJ, a word order that does not exist in Scandinavian (unless the subject has been heavy NP shifted). It does, however, seem that the order is always fixed. Note, for instance, that negative shift in Swedish induces a freezing effect on double object shift (Ken Ramshøj Christensen, personal communication). If the IO is negative in Swedish, the only possible order is the one in 17a; that is, IO > DO. Non-parallel object shift in the presence of a negative object, as in 17b, is ungrammatical. (17) a. Jag gav honom intet ofta I gave him nothing often ‘I didn’t give him anything often.’ b. *Jag I
gav gave
intet nothing
honom him
ofta often
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The usual assumption (see Koch Christensen 1991; Christensen 2003a,b,c, and references there) is that the negative object in Scandinavian occupies the same position as the sentential negation, which evidently shows that object shift must target a position above negation, and not below it (otherwise examples such as 17b could be grammatical in Scandinavian). It therefore seems to me that some extra assumptions are needed to regulate the linear order of the specifiers. Alternatively, and perhaps also desirably, object shift should be accounted for by means other than multiple specifiers. In spite of the problems I have touched upon here, Anagnostopoulou’s study is an extremely important contribution to the understanding of the double object construction. In addition, the book is very interesting because it raises important questions about the theoretical make-up of the Minimalist Program. This book should not only be recommended to those who are interested in the syntax of ditransitives, but to all linguists; not least because it is a showcase of what solid and thorough argumentation should look like. I really enjoyed reading this book. REFERENCES Baker, Mark. C. 2001. The atoms of language: The mind’s hidden rules of grammar. New York: Basic Books. Boeckx, Cedric 2004. Review of The syntax of ditransitives: Evidence from clitics, by Elena Anagnostopoulou 2003. Journal of Linguistics 40.149–153. Bonet, Eulàlia 1991. Morphology after syntax: Pronominal clitics in Romance languages. Doctoral dissertation, MIT. Bonet, Eulàlia 1994. The person-case constraint: A morphological approach. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 22: The morphology-syntax connection, 33–52. Chomsky, Noam 1995. The minimalist program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chomsky, Noam 2000. Minimalist inquiries: The framework. Step by step, ed. by Roger Martin, David Michaels and Juan Uriagereka, 89–155. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chomsky, Noam 2001. Derivation by phase. Ken Hale: A life in language, ed. by Michael Kenstowicz, 1–52. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Christensen, Ken Ramshøj. 2003a. NEG-shift and repair strategies: Pied piping vs. preposition stranding. Unpublished ms., University of Aarhus. Christensen, Ken Ramshøj. 2003b. NEG-shift in the Scandinavian languages and English. Unpublished ms., University of Aarhus.
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Christensen, Ken Ramshøj. 2003c. On the synchronic and diachronic status of the negative adverbial ikke ‘not’. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 72. 1–53. Collins, Chris and Höskuldur Thráinsson. 1996. VP-internal structure and object shift in Icelandic. Linguistic Inquiry 27.391–444. D’Alessandro, Roberta, A. G. 2003. Impersonal si constructions: Agreement and interpretation. Doctoral dissertation, University of Stuttgart. Falk, Cecilia 1990. On double object constructions. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 46.53–100. Holmberg, Anders 1991. On the Scandinavian double object construction. Papers from the 12th Scandinavian conference of linguistics, 141–155. Reykjavík: Institute of Linguistics, University of Iceland. Holmberg, Anders and Christer Platzack. 1995. The role of inflection in Scandinavian syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holmberg, Anders and Thorbjörg Hróarsdóttir. 2003. Agreement and movement in Icelandic raising constructions. Lingua 113.997–1019. (Republished as Holmberg and Hróarsdóttir 2004.) Holmberg, Anders and Thorbjörg Hróarsdóttir. 2004. Agreement and movement in Icelandic raising constructions. Lingua 114.651–673. Hrafnbjargarson, Gunnar Hrafn 2004. Oblique subjects and stylistic fronting in the history of Scandinavian and English: The role of IP-Spec. Doctoral dissertation, University of Aarhus. Kayne, Richard 1975. French syntax: The transformational cycle. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Koch Christensen, Kirsti 1991. AGR, adjunction, and the structure of Scandinavian existential sentences. Lingua 84.137–158. Marantz, Alec 1993. Implications of asymmetries in double object constructions. Theoretical aspects of Bantu grammar, ed. by Sam A. Mchombo, 113–150. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. Perlmutter, David M. 1971. Deep and surface structure constraints in syntax. New York: Rinehart and Winston Inc. Sigursson, Halldór Ármann 1989. Verbal syntax and case in Icelandic. Doctoral dissertation, Lund University. Sigursson, Halldór Ármann 1996. Icelandic finite verb agreement. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 57.1–46.
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The Text Laboratory Department of Linguistics University of Oslo P.O.Box 1102 Blindern 0317 Oslo Norway [
[email protected]]
Morphological Change Up Close. Two and a Half Centuries of Verbal Inflection in Nuremberg. By David Fertig. (Linguistische Arbeiten, 422.) Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2000. Pp. ix, 179. Paper. 52. Reviewed by BRIAN D. JOSEPH, The Ohio State University There are (at least) two types of data-oriented linguists: those who go for data across lots of languages and those who go for lots of data within a single language. David Fertig is clearly a linguist of the second type, as he has put together a masterful and painstakingly detailed study of verbal inflection in the German dialect of Nuremberg in the period between 1356 and 1619, thus based on data which Fertig characterizes as “drawn from a single local variety of a single language” (p. 1). The data for this study come from a collection of texts Fertig assembled consisting of letters, journals, diaries, reports, treatises, bookkeeping records, and protocols, and for all of the items included, a fairly accurate dating was possible, as was the identification of the author. While Fertig gives a remarkably in-depth description of verbal inflection in his well-defined corpus, his goals are not (merely) descriptive in nature. In fact, as he states his aims, they are “to build a theoretical investigation of morphological change on a solid empirical foundation” (p. 1). Clearly, as the above account of the corpus indicates, the empirical foundation he works with is solid, and then some! Fertig is aware of the fact that one can sometimes drown, as it were, in too much data (see on this point Lass 1997, who, as Klein (1999:88–89) puts it, seems to believe that “despite our interest in taking into account as much data as possible in applying the comparative method, too much data can sometimes be a hindrance in that it may muddle the picture by making it
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harder to know what forms to take as input to the method.”). Yet, Fertig realizes, wisely I would say, that a rich database is perhaps the only way that the historical linguist can overcome the basic problem faced by those engaged in analyzing language history, stated by Labov (1972:100) as the need “to make the best of […] bad data—‘bad’ in the sense that it may be fragmentary, corrupted, or many times removed from the actual production of native speakers.” As a result, we are treated here to a study with an exhaustive basis—Fertig included in the database “every token of every verb that occurs in this collection of nearly one-half million words, about 86,000 tokens in all” (p. 1)—and with a foundation like this, it is fair to say that any theoretical conclusions Fertig reaches inspire confidence. After two brief introductory chapters about the overall goals and the nature of the corpus, Fertig lays out in chapter 3 his views about language change and especially morphological change. This chapter is well thought out, and contains some provocative and downright iconoclastic ideas. Rejecting the semiotic principle of “one-form-to-onemeaning” as a viable principle of morphology, Fertig argues for the SEPARATION HYPOTHESIS and suggests that “indirect, conditional, nonone-to-one mapping between function (or meaning) and form is [to be] regarded as normal and expected in morphology” (p. 16). He goes on to take issue with the importance that some (see, for example, Bybee 1985) have placed on diagrammatic iconicity (involving the extent to which fusion of a stem with an inflectional marker reflects the relative semantic relevance of each piece to the lexical item’s meaning, to dispute the rareness of exaptation (Lass 1990’s term for the reuse of linguistic “detruitus” by speakers in novel yet rational ways), to reassess the relationship of analogy and rules, and to emend the definition of paradigm leveling to “the paradigm-internally motivated elimination of an allomorphic stem alternation” (p. 32). This last point is especially important since, as he notes (p. 31), “a very high proportion of the changes in verbal inflection observable in the Nuremberg texts involve [sic] what is traditionally referred to as analogical or paradigm(atic) leveling.” He also recognizes the importance of blends and hypercorrection (which he sees as “a kind of analogical development”, p. 37) for the data in his corpus, but is doubtful about traditional typologies of analogical change.
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At this point in the book Fertig takes me to task for my lumping “all types of ‘change due to the influence of one form on another’ […] together under the heading ‘analogy’” (in Joseph 1998:362), saying that such “a practice […] has led to the frequent criticism of analogy as a ‘catchall’ term for processes that do not really have anything interesting in common” (p. 36). Let me offer, as a brief excursus, the following defense of my approach. My claim is that various changes, including such traditionally recognized phenomena as paradigm leveling, formclass (external) analogy, contamination (blending), re-compounding (renewal), reanalysis, and even folk etymology, do have much in common. For example, they are typically sporadic (as opposed to the regularity of sound change), typically show the involvement of some other form and a perceived relation to that other form (whereas sound change is impervious to such perceived relations), and typically are embedded in some grammatical subsystem of the language (whereas sound change is blind to grammatical involvement). We might add as well that these characteristics show these changes to have a psychological/cognitive grounding, whereas sound change can be seen as strictly phonetic and physiological in nature. This approach may indeed represent the defining of analogy “negatively as whatever is not sound change, semantic change, or borrowing,” a practice Fertig is clearly not impressed by, but so be it—to me, these characteristics represent valid properties of this otherwise disparate assortment of changes and show how they cohere as a group as opposed to other classes of changes with their own motivating factors (such as physiological ones, in the case of sound change, or social ones, as in the case of borrowing and diffusion more generally). To return to Fertig’s study, chapters 4 through 7 constitute the core of the presentation and analysis of the data. Chapter 4 offers first a detailed look at the inflectional endings, organized by person and number, with a special section on the 1st and 3rd plural forms of the present of sein ‘be’, whereas chapter 5 treats stem alternations. In this latter chapter, the organizing principle is essentially strong versus weak verbs, with a separate treatment of the modals, wissen ‘know’ and tun ‘do’, with discussion of stem-final consonant alternations as well (for instance, Verner’s Law alternations). The theoretical point to be drawn from chapter 5 has to do with directionality in leveling, and Fertig finds that the notions of “local markedness and relative token frequency”
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(espoused, among others, by Tiersma 1982 and Bybee 1994) do “not appear to be applicable to the cases of leveling in verbal morphology” seen in the Nuremberg corpus (p. 107). Chapter 6 examines shifts that some verbs show between inflectional classes, a phenomenon that provides an interesting test—and to some extent confirmation—of the theory of inflectional class stability advocated by Wurzel (1984) wherein the importance of the stem vowel in determining inflectional class membership was stressed. Chapter 7 focuses on the ge- participial prefix, clarifying, among other things, some aspects of the absence of this prefix where it might otherwise be expected. In his concluding chapter, Fertig makes an important nod in the direction of sociolinguistics and variation and how change is to be understood in this context. Given the acuity of his remarks throughout the book, and the general reasonableness of what he says in this chapter, with its reference to usage differences seen in “the opposition between the chancery and administrators, on the one hand, and the women, on the other” (p. 144), one can only regret that this chapter is so short, a mere four and a half pages! Healthy iconoclasm is found here too, as Fertig concludes, following Labov 1989, that while there is a relation between variation and change, “the earlier view equating variation with change in progress is now obsolete” (p. 147). This work is clearly written and very cleanly produced, with only a few typographical errors at most. There is no index—a minor failing— but Fertig does include an extensive (17-page!) bibliography, and three appendices, one a ten-page verb frequency list giving the frequency of occurrence for every verb in the corpus (not surprisingly, sein ‘be’ and haben ‘have’ are the two most common, followed by werden ‘become’ wollen ‘want’, sollen ‘ought to’, lassen ‘let’, kommen ‘come’, tun ‘do’, and schreiben ‘write’, to round out the top ten), one a two-page sampling of lines from his data tables, and the last a two-page listing of sources for the texts in his collection. All in all, this is a most satisfying contribution to our understanding both of the development of German verbal inflection and of the nature of morphological change. Despite the appeal of broad cross-linguistic surveys, real progress in our field is made, I would say, with fine-grained exhaustive studies of the sort that this excellent and provocative work represents.
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REFERENCES Bybee, Joan. 1985. Morphology. A study of the relation between meaning and form. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bybee, Joan. 1994. Morphological universals and change. The encyclopedia of language and linguistics, vol. 5, ed. by R. E. Asher and J. M. Y. Simpson, 2557–2562. New York: Pergamon. Joseph, Brian D. 1998. Diachronic morphology. The handbook of morphology, ed. by Andrew Spencer and Arnold M. Zwicky, 351–373. Oxford: Blackwell. Klein, Jared S. 1999. Theory vs. practice in diachronic linguistics. Review of Historical linguistics and language change, by Roger Lass 1997. Language Sciences 21.87–104. Labov, William. 1972. Some principles of linguistic methodology. Language in Society 1.97–120. Labov, William. 1989. The child as linguistic historian. Language Variation and Change 1.85–97. Lass, Roger. 1990. How to do things with junk: Exaptation in language evolution. Journal of Linguistics 26.79–102. Lass, Roger. 1997. Historical linguistics and language change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tiersma, Peter. 1982. Local and general markedness. Language 58.832–849. Wurzel, Wolfgang Ullrich. 1984. Flexionsmorphologie und Natürlichkeit. Berlin: Akademie.
Department of Linguistics 222 Oxley Hall The Ohio State University Columbus, OH 43210-1298 USA [
[email protected]]
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Clausal Syntax of German. By Judith Berman. Stanford: CSLI Publications, 2003. Pp. iii, 187. Paper. $25.00. Reviewed by ANNIE ZAENEN, Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) This monograph discusses some of the major problems in German syntax from the Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) perspective codified in Bresnan 2001. Although there are some LFG papers that discuss phenomena in German syntax and there is an older introduction by Berman and Frank (1996), there was until now no book-length work in the LFG framework that focuses uniquely on the syntax of German. This work, although still a rather slender volume, changes this state of affairs. After an introduction to LFG based on Bresnan 2001 the book provides a treatment of some often, and some less, discussed phenomena and spells out their relevance to LFG theory. Chapter 3 (the first substantial one) translates the topological model of German sentence structure into a phrase structure model with functional projections, and centers on the problem of whether German has an IP along with a CP. Following mainly arguments given by Haider (1991, 1997), Berman adopts a non-IP analysis. She also follows Haider in proposing a flat structure for the clause final verbal complex. In the course of this chapter, Berman assumes, without much discussion, that German follows the endocentric mapping principles of Bresnan 2001 for the projections of C. This means that she assumes that these German c-to-f-structure mappings are configurational. For the projections of V, she also proposes several levels of VP embedding, but does not clearly say which role they play, because she proposes that the grammatical functions in the middle field are identified through lexicocentric function specification (case marking). Various levels of VPs in the middle field are often proposed in GB to account for the different partial VP-fronting possibilities, but LFG does not need this device. Chapter 4 argues that although German has no subject position it requires a subject function in every sentence. Given the obvious absence of overt subjects in several types of German sentences, that point of view needs to be supported. Berman adapts to LFG a proposal made in GB, namely that the 3rd person marking on the tensed verb in ostensibly subjectless sentences constitutes the subject. In zu-infinitives with anaphoric control, the subject function with a “PRO” value is introduced
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by a functional equation on the zu and in clauses with functional control via the functional control itself. As the discussion shows, the LFG machinery makes it very easy to introduce categories in the functional structure that do not have a corresponding c-structure. This makes clear arguments for such categories desirable. Berman shows that her proposals can be made work. However, she does not show that they solve any problems, such as the occurrence of nominative phrases in infinitives (for example, einer nach dem anderen ‘one after the other’), in a more elegant or economic way than other alternatives. Still, following GB tradition, she tries to link her treatment of verbal inflection as introducing a subject to a typology of languages with and without overt subjects. She contrasts Scandinavian languages without verb agreement with German to account for the obligatoriness of overt subjects in the former. However, she also classifies Dutch as a language with obligatory overt subjects; but it is well known that this is the wrong generalization for the majority dialect, where the expletive is optional. Moreover, it creates a problem for her account, as the morphology of Dutch is rich enough to allow the subject to be absent in the c-structure. Of course, the optionality of the Dutch expletive also creates a problem for the proposal advocated. Chapters 5 is likely the most interesting for readers focusing on LFG theory rather than on German syntax because it discusses the introduction of empty c-structure categories (traces), a relative novelty in the theory. Berman follows Bresnan 2001 in proposing a limited set of empty c-structure categories in LFG on the basis of a study of weak crossover phenomena. The arguments follow Bresnan 2001 rather closely for long distance crossover (Bresnan’s account in turn is based in part on an earlier paper by Berman). The account relies on empty cstructure categories to handle contrasts such as that between 1 and 2. (1)
Who said that he consoled his mother?
(2)
a. *Wen sagte seine Mutter habe who said his mother have
sie she
getröstet? consoled
b. *Who did his mother say that she consoled? The argument is based on the assumption that one needs to refer to linear order to state the exact conditions on the grammaticality of such
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crossover configurations. Bresnan (2001) motivates the need for empty categories in long distance dependencies by the mapping principles from c-to-f-structure, which state that in languages such as English, GF are mapped from configurationally identified c-structures. Berman assumes the same account for German. Berman accounts for the difference in grammaticality between German and English sentences, such as those found in 3, by assuming a different status for German local subjects and local topicalization: they are in the domain of lexicocentric function specification (identification through case marking). (3) a. … dass that
seine Mutter jeder mag. his mother everyone likes
b. Seine Mutter mag jeder. his mother likes everyone. c. *His mother everyone likes. The proposal then assumes that there needs to be a trace in the German middle field to account for long distance crossover, but given the lack of crossover effects within the middle field it can be anywhere. The contrast between English and German with respect to object crossover is covered by some not very well-worked out but not implausible assumptions about constraints on argument structure. Berman discusses the counterproposal of Dalrymple et al. 2001 that does not require traces, but rejects it because it does not rely on the endrocentric mapping principles and the morphological function specification proposed in Bresnan 2001. It seems rather frivolous to accept a major revision of the theory and the whole philosophy of LFG without discussing in detail exactly what damage the Dalrymple et al. 2001 proposal does to the architecture of the c-structure to f-structure mappings. As far as I know, the long distance crossover facts are the only argument for traces in German (and any other language). One cannot reject a counter analysis by simply saying that it would contradict assumptions that are made only to make one’s own analysis possible. The assumption that German is an endocentric (configurational) language in the relevant aspects, and the c-to-f-structure mapping principles defined in Bresnan 2001 make it impossible to account for
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long distance dependencies without traces, and this is the path that Berman follows without further discussion in chapter 6. In light of these assumptions, she discusses both a functional uncertainty and a cyclic approach with iterating local dependencies without adducing data that would clearly favor one over another. In chapter 7, “Distribution of Sentential Subjects”, Berman defends two claims: that all embedded tensed clauses in German are at the periphery (left-dislocated or extraposed), and that clauses have the same grammatical functions as nominal arguments, so that one can dispense with the COMP function. I find this chapter rather badly organized and do not understand very well what these two claims have to do with each other. What follows is my best attempt to make sense of it. The claim that sentential arguments have the same grammatical functions as nominal ones is based on a reconsideration of arguments presented in Dalrymple and Lødrop 2000, who propose a mixed analysis where some clauses are COMPs and others are OBJs. Berman argues that some of their arguments rest on the wrong examples, and that when the right examples are chosen it can be argued that that-clauses in German can be OBJs or OBLs, and that none need to be assumed to be COMPs. An argument in favor of COMP-clauses given in Dalrymple and Lødrup 2000 is based on the contrast between 4 and 5. (4) Dass die Erde rund ist, (das) hat that the earth round is that has ‘That the earth is round surprised him.’ (5)
ihn gewundert. him surprised
Dass die Erde rund ist, *(darüber) hat sie sich gewundert. that the earth round is *it-about has she herself surprised. ‘That the earth is round, she was surprised about that’
The assumption here is that OBJs can be topicalized, whereas COMPs cannot. Berman proposes to reanalyze apparent sentential topicalization as left-dislocation with deletion of the resumptive pronoun, which is seen as a case of topic drop. As Berman observes, this analysis is an LFG adaptation of an analysis proposed for Dutch by Koster (1978) and for German by Oppenrieder (1991). As topic drop is only possible with subjects and (accusative) objects, it accounts for the contrasts above.
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Note, however, that this treatment of “topicalized” that-clauses does not require the assumed function assignment: left-dislocated elements are not assumed to have the same function as the element that they are anaphorically connected to. In fact they are generally assumed to have only a discourse function and no subcategorized one.1 This, of course, is no argument against the proposed analysis, only against the way the argument is structured. Things become more puzzling if one looks at the second position where that-clauses can occur: extraposed in the Nachfeld. This is a position where nominal elements cannot occur. As sentences are not morphologically marked, we need to develop new positions to identify them. Berman proposes to right adjoin them to the VP. However, again this is not a position for other subcategorized arguments, so it does not jibe with the proposal that that-clauses have the same function as nominal arguments. Here I would rather argue that this is an argument against this proposal, as maintaining it weakens the mapping theory. What then are the arguments in favor of OBJ and OBL function? They are the ones developed in Dalrymple and Lødrop 2000: alternation with a nominal object, passivization, and coordination. However, passive sentences can be analyzed as involving topicalization/left-dislocation as above. Alternations have to be allowed in general, so the main argument is coordination. Here Berman makes the interesting observation that the (a) versions of the following sentences are grammatical, whereas the (b) versions are not. (6) a. Ich informierte ihn über die Situation I informed him about the situation und dass and that
Hans krank Hans sick
ist. is
‘I informed him about the situation and that Hans is sick.’
1
The structure that Berman proposes for “topicalized” that-clauses might be closer to that of contrastive dislocation construction as described in Thráinsson 1979, Zaenen 1997 and Grohmann 2000 for German, but that type of construction is not discussed anywhere.
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b. *Ich informierte ihn, dass Hans krank ist I informed him that Hans sick is und über and over
die Situation. the situation
(7) a. Er vergass die Verabredung und dass es wichtig war, he forgot the appointment and that it important was pünklich on-time
zu sein. to be
‘He forgot the appointment and that it was important to be on time.’ b. *Er he
vergass dass es wichtig war, pünklich zu sein forgot that it important was on-time to be
und die Verabredung. and the appointment However, she does not propose an analysis of this contrast. She suggests that the sentence final versions can be assumed to be extraposed, but if that is the case this would be the first clear violation of the coordinated constituent constraint, and if we are to assume null pronouns in the second constituent of the grammatical clauses it would be nice to have some arguments for them. To summarize: left-dislocated clauses do not need an OBJ or OBL function, extraposed ones do not pattern with nominal OBJs or OBLs, and so are no argument for a similarity in function. The contrasts in 6 and 7 might form the basis for an argument if identity of function is required for coordination, but they remain unexplained under the analysis given. The last substantial chapter discusses the occurrence of es with finite clauses. It is too complex to summarize, as it relies on six interacting assumptions, only one of which is specific to this discussion. It is a rather satisfying demonstration of the power of the framework developed in the previous chapters. The book ends with a summary and a list of some open problems.
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Overall, Clausal Syntax of German is a more than competent analysis of some major problems in German syntax in the LFG framework. From the discussion above, it is most likely clear that its main quality is not originality, which is not surprising given that this is a reworked doctoral dissertation. The lack of originality is potentially positive because specialists in German syntax could read the book to familiarize themselves with LFG, as it allows one to see clearly what is common to previous analyses and what is specific to LFG. Most of the discussion is clear and coherent, adapted ideas are correctly attributed to their original authors, and problems are clearly flagged. Together with Bresnan 2001, this work constitutes an excellent source for anyone who wants to teach an introduction to LFG with German data. REFERENCES Berman, Judith and Anette Frank. 1996. Deutsche and Französische Syntax im Formalismus der LFG. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Bresnan, Joan. 2001. Lexical-functional syntax. Oxford: Blackwell. Dalrymple, Mary and Helge Lødrup. 2000. The grammatical functions of complement clauses. Proceedings of the LFG ’00 conference, ed. by Miriam Butt and Tracy H. King, 82–103. http://www-csli.stanford.edu/publications/ LFG/5/lfg00.html. Dalrymple, Mary, Ron Kaplan, and Tracy H. King. 2001. Weak crossover and the absence of traces. Proceedings of the LFG ’01 conference. ed. by Miriam Butt and Tracy H. King, 66–82. http://www-csli.stanford.edu/publications/ LFG/6/lfg01.html. Grohmann, Kleanthes. 2000. Copy left dislocation. Proceedings of the 19th West Coast conference on formal linguistics, ed. by Roger Billerey and Danielle Lillehaugen. 139–152. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. Haider, Hubert. 1991 Fakultativ kohärente Infinitkonstruktionen im Deutschen. Technical Report 17, Universität Stuttgart. Haider, Hubert. 1997. Projective economy: On the minimal functional structure of the German clause. German: Syntactic problems – problematic syntax, ed. by Werner Abraham and Elly van Gelderen. 83–103, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Koster, Jan. 1978. Why subject sentences don’t exist. Recent transformational studies in European languages, ed. by Samuel J. Keyser. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Oppenrieder, Wilhelm. 1991. Von Subjekten, Sätzen und Subjektsätzen. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.
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Thráinsson, Höskuldur. 1979. On complementation in Icelandic. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Cambridge/New York: Garland Publishers. Zaenen, Annie. 1997. Contrastive dislocation in Dutch and Icelandic. Materials on left dislocation, ed. by Elena Anagnostopoulou, Henk van Riemsdijk, and Frans Zwarts. 119–148, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Annie Zaenen Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) 3333, Coyote Hill Road Palo Alto, CA 94304 USA [
[email protected]]
Journal of Germanic Linguistics 17.1 (2005):39–75
REVIEWS
Prolific Domains: On the Anti-Locality of Movement Dependencies. By Kleanthes K. Grohmann. (Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 66). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2003. Pp. xiv, 369. Hardcover. $138.00. Reviewed by JUSTIN M. FITZPATRICK, Massachusetts Institute of Technology This monograph consists of a revision of the author’s doctoral dissertation, with the addition of extensions and related work by the author and collaborators. In this work Grohmann makes the interesting suggestion that along with STANDARD LOCALITY (the familiar upper bound on the length of syntactic dependencies), movement dependencies are subject to a lower bound, that is, ANTI-LOCALITY. This suggestion is implemented through a partition of the clause into three parts (roughly the theta-domain, the agreement domain, and the left periphery) and some simple conditions on movement between and within these domains. The result is a new candidate proposal in the realm of multiple/cyclic spell-out theories that provides a novel analysis of anaphora in several domains, as well as of left dislocation of various types. Although the proposal also has interesting theoretical implications (for example, a less stipulative ban on “improper movement”), it suffers from some empirical and theoretical shortcomings, which I will outline below. The Anti-Locality thesis introduced in chapter 1 is implemented through the theory of PROLIFIC DOMAINS. According to this theory, the clause consists of three parts, or domains, defined over familiar syntactic categories: (1) the -domain, in which -roles are discharged/assigned/ checked (material at and below the vP level), (2) the -domain, where agreement/-features are checked (material above the vP level including agreement projections (Agr), tense, and aspect), and (3) the -domain, the location of syntactically represented discourse roles, such as topic and focus (a finely articulated left periphery along the lines of Rizzi 1997). Anti-Locality states that movement cannot take place within a single Prolific Domain. To some extent, Anti-Locality could be viewed as a response to critics of the line of research that seeks to explain syntactic dependencies © Society for Germanic Linguistics
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in terms of movement rather than construal, chains, or accidental binding (Hornstein 2001, Kayne 2002, among others). Since Hornstein (2001) makes crucial use of movement to -position, critics might ask why, if such movement is allowed, we do not observe sentences such as 1a with the meaning of 1b, given the possibility of the movement operation in 1c where John is merged as theme and moves to the external argument position. (1) a. *John likes. b. John likes himself. c. [vP John v [VP likes
]]
The Anti-Locality framework provides a principled answer. Movement within a single Prolific Domain (in 1, movement from one theta position to another within the same VP) is too local. If independent evidence for Anti-Locality could be found, this critique of movement into theta position would then disappear. This book attempts to provide such evidence. However, it should be noted that were Hornstein to be wrong, much of Grohmann’s proposal would still be tenable. In chapter 2 the following is introduced as an explicit Anti-Locality condition: Condition on Domain Exclusivity (CDE) (p. 78) For a given Prolific Domain , an object O in the phrase-marker must receive an exclusive interpretation at the interfaces, unless duplicity of O yields a drastic effect on the output of . Putting aside for the moment what “duplicity” and “drastic” mean, the CDE essentially states that a given object can only appear once in a Prolific Domain. Grohmann attempts to explain this restriction as a ban on ambiguity at the PF interface. A phonological form for a given Prolific Domain must contain unambiguous instructions. If an object appears twice in the domain, as it would if it moves domain-internally, ambiguity arises. However, there is one way to circumvent the ban on domain-internal movement imposed by the CDE: an object can appear more than once in a Prolific Domain if one copy of the object is pronounced differently from the other. Grohmann calls this escape hatch
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COPY SPELL-OUT.
41
This is, presumably, what is meant by the vague “drastic effect” condition above. While there is an intuitively appealing aspect to Prolific Domains and the CDE, Grohmann’s explanation of the CDE in terms of a PF ban on duplicate spell-out suffers somewhat from his adoption of Nunes’ (1995) approach to copy theory and deletion. Nunes argues that, due to the Linear Correspondence Axiom (Kayne 1994), only one copy of a given syntactic object can be spelled out phonologically. Other copies, formed through movement (envisioned as copy+merger), must be deleted. Lower copies are generally deleted since they contain more unchecked features. But if copies can be deleted, it should be simple to circumvent the CDE and allow all sorts of domain-internal movement, as long as all copies (but one) are deleted. Grohmann addresses this concern to some extent by saying that unpronounced copies are not deleted, but ignored. This is presumably due to a spell-out algorithm (unspecified in the monograph) that determines for a given domain where a given phrase with multiple occurrences is spelled out. If this is true, then the adoption of Nunes’s approach to copy theory and deletion is only a hindrance. Grohmann’s work could be done by a simple remerger account of movement, without the problems introduced by a copy operation and subsequent deletion. Chapter 2 spells out the architecture of the system within which the Anti-Locality thesis is couched. The introductory material in the first two chapters might have benefited from additional editorial attention, as it may be vague and confusing at times. As such, it will be difficult to follow for readers not already familiar with recent work in minimalism. In fact, some of this material could have been omitted without affecting the book’s main proposals, although some material in chapter 2 becomes crucial later in the book. First, Grohmann argues against Chomsky’s (1995) proposal that little v is the locus of both external argument licensing and accusative case marking. Grohmann wishes to divorce the former, which is part of the -domain, from the latter, which is a related property. Second, Grohmann argues against the existence of multiple specifiers. The clausal architecture assumed here allows a single specifier for a given XP (formed either through direct merger or movement) and any number of adjuncts, which appear above the specifier and can only be formed through (external) merger. This approach to specifiers and adjuncts allows an account of certain facts
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about left dislocation addressed later in the book. However, when this issue is discussed, the reader is left wondering why one would wish to rule out multiple specifiers. Unsupported statements, such as “multiple specifiers are undesirable, do not buy us much empirically, and can be banned from the grammar” (p. 53) are even more puzzling, especially given much recent work on multiple specifiers (see, for example, Richards 1999). Following Chomsky (2000:116), Grohmann attempts to derive fundamental specifier-head, head-head, and head-complement relations through the use of what he calls the “Natural Relations” provided by merger. However, this attempt does not quite go through. While Grohmann is correct that the combination of SISTER and IMMEDIATELYCONTAIN, two relations that arguably fall out from the operation Merge, provides a natural account of the specifier-head relation, this same relation should hold between a head and the specifier of that head’s complement. Therefore, while Grohmann’s approach includes the SpecHead relation, it might be too permissive. Grohmann also argues for a greed-based over an attraction-based treatment of movement based on these relations. The SpecHead relation, viewed as ImmediatelyContain(Sister-Of (XP)), fits into a greed-based framework since it is the XP in the specifier position that checks features on the head, not the other way around. However, this deduction seems spurious to me. It is based on the assumption that the MotherDaughter relation (Immediately-Contain()) is fundamental, but the DaughterMother relation (Mother()) is not. Furthermore, the discussion is open to Chametsky’s (2003:200–201) critique that more “natural relations” are definable from these assumptions than are needed. Chapters 3 through 6 form the empirical core of the book. Chapter 3 presents a treatment of local anaphora as the result of too-local movement within the -domain, with Copy Spell-out of the lower trace as an anaphor, as in 2, where Copy Spell-out is shown as (X). (2)
[vP John v [VP likes John ( himself)]
This analysis is only available if movement to a theta position is possible, as it is in a system where theta roles are treated as features to be checked through merger or movement. This treatment of anaphora serves
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as a proof-of-concept of the CDE and Copy Spell-out in the -domain. It differs from other movement-based analyses of binding (see, for instance, Kayne 2002) in that the anaphor is not present prior to Copy Spell-out. In this chapter, anaphora in exceptional case marking contexts are also treated through Copy Spell-out, but in the -domain. The PF explanation of the CDE is challenged further if an analogous analysis applies to sentences that contain multiple anaphora, as in John is protecting himself from himself. Here one would expect the CDE to rule out multiple Copy Spell-out of John as himself. Grohmann acknowledges this problem, but provides no clear solution. Chapter 4 contains perhaps the most interesting empirical case study of the CDE and Copy Spell-out, namely that of left dislocation, including topicalization as in 3a, contrastive left dislocation (CLD) as in 3b, clitic left dislocation (CLLD) as in 3c, and two types of hanging topic left dislocation (HTLD), shown in 3d,e. (3) a. Diesen Mann mag ich this man know I ‘This man, I don’t know.’ b. Den Martin, den the Martin D-PRON
nicht. not
habe ich schon lange have I already long
German
German
nicht mehr gesehen. not anymore seen ‘Martin, I haven’t seen [him] in a long time.’ c. [Afton ton andra], dhen ton ksero. this the man not CLITIC know.1SG ‘This man, I don’t know [him].’ d. [Diese-r/-n Mann]—den/ihn habe ich this man PRON have I noch nie gesehen. yet never seen ‘This man, I’ve never seen him before.’
Greek
German
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e. [Diese-r/-n Mann]—ich habe this man I have
den/ihn
German
PRON
noch nie gesehen. yet never seen ‘This man, I’ve never seen him before.’ According to Grohmann, topicalization, CLD, and CLLD suggest that the left-dislocated XP is derived through movement from a clause internal position, while this is not true of HTLD. Evidence for this, some of it well-known, includes Case connectivity and reconstruction effects (binding of anaphora, bound variable readings, obviation of weak crossover) in the first three, but not in HTLD. Turning to CLD, we can ask how the left-dislocated XP could be moved from a clause-internal position when the resumptive pronoun (RP) is in the prototypical preverbal topic position, presumably moved from a clause-internal position. Grohmann suggests that the RP is the result of Copy Spell-out of a lower occurrence of XP within the -domain, as shown in 4. (4)
[CP XP [TopP XP (RP) V-Top0 [IP …XP… [vP …XP…]]]]
Here the dislocated XP moves to topic position (within the left-peripheral -domain), and then moves on to a “quasi-extra-sentential” CP projection. While it is not clear what this CP projection is, this movement is too local and only Copy Spell-out can make the derivation legitimate by the CDE. The assumptions regarding specifiers and adjuncts from chapter 2 allow an account of the ordering among HTLDed and CLDed XPs, where the former always appear to the left of the latter. One appealing aspect of Grohmann’s analysis of the demonstrative pronoun in CLD as the spell-out of a copy due to Anti-Locality is that resumptive pronouns now appear when standard (maximum-distance) locality is violated, as with islands for movement, and also when Anti-Locality is violated. This treatment of CLD might also provide an argument against chain formation as a plausible alternative to movement. In this case, one would have to posit a difference between chains in CLD and coreference (presumably also encoded with coindexation) in HTLD. Chapter 5 returns to CLLD and analyzes this phenomenon as Copy Spell-out in the -domain. Grohmann suggests that the CLLDed XP
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moves through two positions in an Agreement projection: one adjoined to the Agr head and one in the specifier of this head. The occurrence adjoined to the Agr head is spelled out as a clitic. The XP in [Spec,AgrP] then moves on to a left-peripheral topic position. (5)
[AgrP XP [Agr XP( Clitic)–Agr0] [vP …XP…]]
This analysis of CLLD is perhaps the book’s most problematic part. First, it predicts that all languages with CLLD should have clitic doubling. There is nothing inherent in 5 that would force XP to move on to a topic position, so the derivation should be possible in any clause. However, Italian is a classic example of a language with CLLD but no clitic doubling. Furthermore, since the left-dislocated XP does undergo movement to the -domain (presumably the domain of A-bar movement), the analysis falls to Cinque’s (1990) argument that if CLLD involves A-bar movement, it should license parasitic gaps, contrary to fact. The advantage of the CLD and CLLD analyses is that they would explain several observed differences between the two, as well as moving toward an account of why and in which languages these types of left dislocation should occur. Why does Copy Spell-out emerge as an anaphor in some cases, a pronoun in others, and a clitic in still others? Grohmann comes close to explaining this distinction by appeal to different domains: anaphors arise in the -domain, clitics in the -domain (when the language has Agrrelated clitics), and pronouns in the -domain. However, the analysis of ECM anaphors as arising in the -domain makes this line of reasoning less consistent. Furthermore, the author provides no explanation for why only lower copies undergo Copy Spell-out as a pronoun/anaphor/clitic. Grohmann alludes to a possible feature-based explanation along the lines of Nunes 1995, but, as noted above, Nunes’ assumptions may be problematic for the CDE theory. Chapter 6 summarizes Grohmann and Haegeman 2003 and extends the Copy Spell-out paradigm to the DP level, where Grohmann argues that the DP contains multiple Prolific Domains (analogous to clausal structure), and that domain-internal movement within the DP also triggers Copy Spell-out. The latter is used to account for pronominal possessor doubling in Germanic, as in German dem Vater sein Auto ‘the father’s car’ (lit. the father his car). If movement (and Copy Spell-out) is
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at play here, Hornstein’s (2003) suggestion that movement does not underlie control in DPs (as in John’s attempt PRO to leave) may be at risk. Chapter 7 presents some of the most interesting ideas of the book. Grohmann reviews the long history of research into syntactic cyclicity and develops a view of cyclicity in the Prolific Domains framework in the form of two generalizations. (6) a. Inter-Clausal Movement Generalization Movement across a clause boundary can only target a position within the same Prolific Domain as the source position. b. Intra-Clausal Movement Generalization Movement within a clause always targets the next highest Prolific Domain. The combination of 6a and 6b, together with the unnoted assumption that a syntactic object must have an occurrence in each clause between the highest and lower occurrence of that object, ensure a strongly falsifiable type of cyclicity. Moving phrases always target either the next highest clause-internal domain or the same domain in next highest clause. The result is a satisfying account of so-called “improper movement” (the ban on A-bar movement followed by A-movement) without simply stipulating that this type of movement is “improper”. Grohmann adopts a MULTIPLE SPELL-OUT approach that differs in crucial ways from both Uriagereka’s (1999) and the phase-based approach put forth by Chomsky (2000). In the Prolific Domains framework, each domain— (vP), (IP), and (CP)—is submitted to PF and LF computation after it is built. Cyclicity in movement is viewed as a fundamental property of this system, not as an accidental property of intervening heads, as in theories that incorporate the EPP as a trigger for movement. The principles in 6 predict that raising verbs embedded under control verbs should behave as if they were control verbs, a prediction that Grohmann claims is born out in English. For example, in 7a John is raised clause-internally from its first theta position to the -domain, from where it raises clause-internally to the -domain of the raising verb seem. However, from here John would have to move to the -domain of the control verb hope, a move ruled out by 6b. Therefore, the derivation
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must be as in 7b, where John moves from -domain to -domain until it reaches hope. This entails that John must be an argument of seem, and so seem must behave like a control verb, a prediction Grohmann claims is born out. (7) John hopes to seem to be intelligent. a. *[ John hopes [ John to [ seem [ John to be [ John intelligent]]]]] b. [ John hopes [ to [ John seem [ to be [ John intelligent]]]]] But this prediction does not hold up cross-linguistically. Rizzi (1986) shows that a coreferential anaphor can appear between an NP and a controlled PRO, as in 8a, but not between an NP and its trace position in raising, as in 8b. (8) a. Gianni1 si1 promette di [PRO1 essere diligente]. Gianni self promises to-be diligent ‘Gianni promises himself to be diligent.’ b. *Gianni1 si1 sembra [t1 essere inteligente]. Gianni self seems to-be intelligent ‘Gianni seems to himself to be intelligent.’ The discussion of 7 suggests that when embedded under a control verb (such as sperare), raising verbs (such as sembrare) should pattern with 8a. However, as shown in 9, this is not the case.1 (9) *Gianni1 spera di sembrarsi1 inteligente. Gianni hopes to-seem to-self intelligent ‘Gianni hopes to seem to himself to be intelligent.’ Further problems arise with this strict view of cyclicity if whadjuncts in the -domain must pass through the -domain on the way to their surface -domain position. The question is what type of agreement
1
My thanks to David Pesetsky for pointing out this argument to me, and to Enzo Moscati for the Italian data.
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forces adjunct movement to the -domain since most (all?) languages lack agreement with adjuncts. As a whole, the proposals of the book are thought provoking and appealing. Grohmann does a good job of motivating his proposals independently, so Anti-Locality does not become an ad hoc patch required by Hornstein’s (2001) treatment of control as movement. However, since it adopts many of Hornstein’s assumptions, the book is open to criticism along the lines of Landau 2003 and Culicover and Jackendoff 2001. The tripartite division of the clause has intuitive appeal, and Grohmann’s treatment of cyclicity within the three-domain system provides an interesting alternative in the realm of multiple spell-out theories. It also provides a satisfying ban on improper movement. While empirical and theoretical problems remain, they are outweighed by the book’s virtues and should serve as challenges to those pursuing a theory of AntiLocality. REFERENCES Chametsky, Robert A. 2003. Phrase structure. Minimalist syntax, ed. by Randall Hendrick, 192–225. Oxford: Blackwell. Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The minimalist program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chomsky, Noam. 2000. Minimalist inquiries: The framework. Step by step, ed. by Roger Martin, David Michaels, and Juan Uriagereka, 89–156. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cinque, Guglielmo. 1990. Types of A-bar dependencies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Culicover, Peter and Ray Jackendoff. 2001. Control is not movement. Linguistic Inquiry 32.493–511. Grohmann, Kleathes and Liliane Haegeman. 2003. Resuming reflexives. Nordlyd 31. Proceedings of the19th Scandinavian conference in linguistics, ed. by Anne Dahl, Kristine Bentzen, and Peter Svenonius, 46–62. Hornstein, Norbert. 2001. Move! A minimalist theory of construal. Oxford: Blackwell. Hornstein, Norbert. 2003. On control. Minimalist syntax, ed. by Randall Hendrick, 6–81. Oxford: Blackwell. Kayne, Richard. 1994. The anti-symmetry of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kayne, Richard. 2002. Pronouns and their antecedents. Derivation and explanation in the minimalist program, ed. by Samuel David Epstein and T. Daniel Seely, 133–166. Oxford: Blackwell. Landau, Idan. 2003. Movement out of control. Linguistic Inquiry 34.471–498.
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Nunes, Jairo. 1995. The copy theory of movement and linearization of chains in the minimalist program. Doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland. Richards, Norvin. 1999. Featural cyclicity and the ordering of multiple specifiers. Working minimalism, ed. by Samual David Epstein and Norbert Hornstein, 127–158. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rizzi, Luigi. 1986. On chain formation. The syntax of pronominal clitics. Syntax and semantics, vol. 19, ed. by Hagit Borer, 65–95. New York: Academic Press. Rizzi, Luigi. 1997. The fine structure of the left periphery. Elements of grammar: Handbook of generative syntax, ed. by Liliane Haegeman, 281– 337. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Uriagereka, Juan. 1999. Multiple spell out. Working minimalism, ed. by Samuel David Epstein and Norbert Hornstein, 251–282. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. 32-D866 MIT 77 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02139 USA [
[email protected]]
The Syntax of Ditransitives: Evidence from Clitics. By Elena Anagnostopoulou. (Studies in Generative Grammar, 54). BerlinNew York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003. Pp. xiv, 379. Hardcover. $114.40. Reviewed by GUNNAR HRAFN HRAFNBJARGARSON, University of Oslo “The fundamental challenge of comparative linguistics is to find a way of doing justice to both the similarities and the differences without contradiction, without empty compromise, and without sacrificing one truth to the other” (Baker 2001:16). It is my belief that Anagnostopoulou has managed to do this in her book in such a way that it can only be admired. The topic that Anagnostopoulou has chosen is—to put it mildly—rather complex, and as to complicate things even more, Anagnostopoulou uses the entire theoretical apparatus provided by the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995), including multiple specifiers,
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“tucking in”, equidistance, minimal domains, EPP, long-distance agree, etc. (In fact, Boeckx (2004) criticizes Anagnostopoulou’s use of the whole range of theoretical apparatus.) Nevertheless, the book is very easy to read, and Anagnostopoulou’s argumentation is easy to follow. For example, it is the rule rather than the exception that she uses examples from many different languages in support of each of her claims. In this way, a reader like myself who sometimes finds it difficult to decode and understand the Greek (as well as the Romance) data, can be reassured by the fact that Anagnostopoulou usually elaborates on her claims by showing the direction the Germanic languages (Dutch, English, German and Scandinavian) choose to go. These languages sometimes follow Greek and/or Romance, and sometimes they choose an altogether different direction. Although the central focus of the book is on Greek clitic doubling and the Greek double object construction, in this review I am mainly concerned with Anagnostopoulou’s analysis of the Germanic languages, and in particular, passivization and object shift in Scandinavian and constructions with oblique (or quirky) subjects in Icelandic. First, I summarize the main theoretical claims that Anagnostopoulou makes. The book is divided into five chapters. In the first chapter, Anagnostopoulou briefly introduces the overall embracing claim of the book that a dative (the indirect object, henceforth IO) blocks movement of a lower nominative if “(i) the dative is higher than the base position of the nominative and (ii) not contained in the same domain as the nominative [...]” (p. 4). Thus, the derivation in 1 (Anagnostopoulou’s 2, p. 4) is ill-formed, whereas the derivation in 2 (Anagnostopoulou’s 3, p. 5) is well-formed because “the features of the dative move out of the way of the lower nominative [...] and thus the higher dative argument does not count anymore for locality.” (1)
[NOM [Domain DAT [Domain tNOM]]]
(2)
[NOM [DAT-Clitic [Domain tDAT-Clitic [Domain tNOM]]]] STEP I STEP II
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In the second chapter, Anagnostopoulou establishes the generalization reflected in 1 and 2 that in Greek a nominative DP may not move across a dative DP unless the dative DP is realized as a clitic or a part of a clitic doubling chain. Here too, the typology of ditransitives is investigated. Anagnostopoulou argues that two different types of double object constructions should be distinguished, based on where the IO is base-generated. According to Anagnostopoulou, an IO may either be base-generated high within the VP (only this construction qualifies as a true double object construction in Anagnostopoulou’s system) or it may be base-generated low within the VP (in which case it shows the characteristics of a prepositional dative). The crucial difference is, in Anagnostopoulou’s view (following Marantz 1993), that in addition to the main verbal root only the former (the true double object construction) contains a light applicative head (see 3). (3)
v1P SUB
v’ v-TR
v2P IO
v’ vAPPL
VP V
DO
In some languages the light applicative head (vAPPL) may assign morphological case to the IO, while in other languages it may not. vAPPL is also responsible for the different types of object shift found in the Scandinavian languages. Norwegian and Swedish differ from Danish and Icelandic in that the former allow for non-parallel object shift (that is, the order of the IO and the direct object, henceforth DO, can be reversed), whereas the latter only allow for parallel object shift. According to Anagnostopoulou, this difference is due to the fact that in Norwegian and Swedish, but not in Danish and Icelandic, vAPPL allows for an additional specifier position into which the DO can move on its way to the target position of object shift (an outer specifier of vP).
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The third chapter introduces the three “ingredients” that are needed for a locality-based account of ditransitives cross-linguistically; namely Case and the EPP, c-command, and minimal domains. In this chapter, Anagnostopoulou argues that equidistance (and not only closest ccommand) plays a crucial role in the notion of locality. For example, Amovement of derived subjects across higher goals or experiencers is ruled out in the passive when the two arguments are not in the same minimal domain, but such movement is allowed whenever the two arguments are in the same minimal domain, that is, are equidistant from the target position. In the fourth chapter, Anagnostopoulou shows how minimal link condition violations can be avoided if the dative DP is realized as a clitic, or if the dative DP is a part of a clitic doubling chain. In such constructions, movement is not ruled out because the cliticized or the clitic doubled argument is in the same minimal domain as the target of movement. In the fifth chapter, Anagnostopoulou discusses -feature checking in environments where a dative DP enters into a Move/Agree relation with T/transitive v. In particular, Anagnostopoulou discusses two types of person restrictions: the PERSON-CASE CONSTRAINT (PC-Constraint) and the PERSON RESTRICTION ON NOMINATIVE OBJECTS (PRNConstraint). The PC-Constraint is a restriction on clitics in Romance, Greek, Swiss German, Basque and many other languages (also known as the *me/lui or I-II constraint; see, for example, Perlmutter 1971, Kayne 1975, and Bonet 1991, 1994, among many others). Anagnostopoulou’s Greek examples (p. 252, 342) are found in 4. (Note that 4d is incorrectly translated in the book as they will send you to him). (4) a. Tha mu to FUT C1.GEN.1SG C1.ACC.3SG.NEUT ‘They will send it to me.’
stilune send.3PL
b. Tha su ton stilune FUT C1.GEN.2SG C1.ACC.3SG.MASC send.3PL ‘They will send him to you.’ c. *Tha to me stilune FUT C1.GEN.3SG.NEUT/MASC C1.ACC.1SG send.3PL ‘They will send me to him.’
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d. *Tha mu se stilune FUT C1.GEN.1SG C1.ACC.2SG send.3PL ‘They will send you to me.’ The PRN-Constraint is attested in Icelandic DAT-NOM constructions (that is, constructions where the subject is dative and the object is nominative), and in Italian impersonal si-constructions (compare D’Alessandro 2003). The PRN-Constraint prohibits agreement with nominative DPs in NOMINATIVE WITH INFINITIVE constructions (compare Sigursson 1989, 1996); that is, when the nominative DP is not in the same clause as the verb. The example in 5b shows that the verb can agree neither in person nor in number with the first person nominative DP. The example in 5a shows that such constructions are grammatical if the verb does not agree with the first person nominative DP. (5) a. Ykkur ótti ég /vi You.DAT.PL thought.3SG I.NOM/we.NOM ‘You found me/us amusing.’ b. *Ykkur You.DAT.SG
fyndin amusing
óttum /óttu vi fyndin thought.1PL/thought.3PL we.NOM amusing
The PRN-constraint also prohibits the occurrence of first and second person nominative objects. The example in 6 shows that nominative objects cannot be first person (the same holds for second person, but not for third person), even if the verb shows default agreement (compare Sigursson 1996 for a detailed discussion of the grammaticality of such examples; for me, they are ungrammatical). (6) *ér líkai / líkuum / líkuu vi You.DAT liked.3SG / liked.1PL / liked.3PL we.NOM Anagnostopoulou shows that although the PC-Constraint and the PRN-Constraint have many similarities, they differ in three crucial ways (p. 264). First, the PC-Constraint only holds if there is an external argument present, whereas the PRN-Constraint only holds if there is no external argument (Anagnostopoulou assumes that dative subjects are
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derived subjects, compare p. 275, tree 369).1 Second, the PC-Constraint, but not the PRN-Constraint affects weak elements, and finally, the “emergency strategies” induced by the two constraints are different. Romance and Greek “rescue” the respective construction by replacing the clitic with a strong pronoun, whereas in Icelandic the verb simply does not show agreement with the nominative DP. I turn now to what I think are the problematic aspects of Anagnostopoulou’s analysis of passivization and object shift in Scandinavian and Icelandic DAT-NOM constructions. As mentioned, the PRN-Constraint does two fairly different things at the same time. First, the PRN-Constraint regulates the agreement relationship between a verb and a nominative DP, which is not an object but the subject of a small clause. Second, the PRN-Constraint prohibits the occurrence of first/second person nominative objects. In Hrafnbjargarson 2004, I show that the PRN-Constraint can be accounted for in terms of the harmonic alignment of prominence hierarchies (person, case, and grammatical relation). The advantage of such an analysis is that the PRN-Constraint will only prohibit the occurrence of first and second person pronouns as nominative objects, whereas other constraints will regulate the impoverished agreement relationship between the verb and the nominative DP in Nominative with Infinitive constructions. Anagnostopoulou (p. 239ff.) also discusses the intervention effect of dative arguments in Icelandic. In DATIVE WITH INFINITIVE constructions, the matrix verb cannot show agreement with a nominative object in the lower clause. The example in 7 is Anagnostopoulou’s example 327. (7) Mér fannst /*fundust henni leiast Me.DAT seemed.3SG /seemed.3PL her.DAT be-bored ‘I thought she was bored with them.’
eir they.NOM
Anagnostopoulou (p. 240) also mentions that such intervention effects are not found in transitive expletive constructions where the associate of the expletive is a dative DP.
1
This assumption is rather appealing to me, as I think that it makes the correct predictions about the behavior of verbs in DAT-NOM constructions. For example, they cannot occur in the passive (as a consequence of one argument already having been promoted).
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(8) a finnast sumum börnum svona leikir skemmtilegir There seem.3PL some children.DAT such games.NOM fun ‘Some children think that such games are fun.’ Following Chomsky 2000, 2001, Anagnostopoulou assumes that the dative DP enters into an Agree relation with T (the dative DP checks person on T) and that the nominative DP checks number on T. The intervention effect can thus be explained if one assumes that the dative does not enter into an Agree relation with T in 7. Unfortunately, the data that Anagnostopoulou presents do not show the whole picture. All her examples have plural dative arguments as the associate of an expletive, but as Holmberg and Hróarsdóttir (2003:1000) show it matters whether the intervening dative is plural or singular. When the intervening dative is singular, the verb cannot show agreement with the embedded nominative (9b), whereas if the intervening dative is plural such agreement is fine (10b). (9) a. a There
fannst einhverjum found.SG some
essar ljósmyndir these photographs.NOM
manni man.DAT
ljótar ugly
‘A man found these photographs ugly.’ b. *a fundust einhverjum There found.PL some
manni man.DAT
essar ljósmyndir ljótar these photographs.NOM ugly (10) a. a fannst mörgum mönnum There found.SG many.DAT men.DAT essar these
ljósmyndir photographs.NOM
ljótar ugly
‘Many men found these photographs ugly.’
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b. a fundust mörgum mönnum there found.PL many.DAT men.DAT essar these
ljósmyndir photographs.NOM
ljótar ugly
‘Many men found these photographs ugly.’ From example 10b we cannot determine whether the verb shows agreement with the dative subject or the nominative object. However, we might conclude that the dative DP really can check number on T as well as person, and in fact there are some arguments that speak in favor of such an analysis. In my dialect, which is an obligatory agreement dialect (that is, verbs obligatorily show agreement with third person nominative objects), questions such as in 11, where the nominative element is plural and the dative subject may be interpreted as either singular or plural, have different interpretations depending on whether the verb shows default agreement or plural agreement. (11) a. Hverjum fannst ljósmyndirnar ljótar? who.DAT.SG found.SG photographs-the.NOM ugly ‘Who (which man) found these photographs ugly?’ b. Hverjum fundust ljósmyndirnar ljótar? who.DAT.PL found.PL photographs-the.NOM ugly ‘Who (or which men) found these photographs ugly?’ In 11a, where the verb shows default agreement (third person singular), the subject is interpreted as singular. In 11b, where the verb shows number agreement, the subject is interpreted as plural. As Anagnostopoulou discusses in detail, Icelandic ditransitive verbs fall into two classes. One class of verbs (gefa ‘give’, segja ‘tell’, sna ‘show’, etc.) allows symmetric passives (that is, both the IO and the DO may raise to the subject position), while the other class of verbs (skila ‘return’, svipta ‘deprive’, ræna ‘rob’, etc.) only allows asymmetric passives (that is, only the IO may raise to the subject position). Following Falk 1990, Holmberg 1991, Holmberg and Platzack 1995, and Collins and Thráinsson 1996, Anagnostopoulou assumes that the verbs in the former class have a double base: one where the goal is basegenerated above the theme (high in the VP, and thus a true double object
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construction), and another where the goal is base-generated below the theme (low in the VP, and thus corresponds to a PP-construction). As a result, with verbs like gefa ‘give’, both orders, IO > DO, and DO > IO are found. The latter word order is known as the INVERSION CONSTRUCTION. One of the characteristics of the inversion construction is that the IO must be focused or stressed, and therefore it cannot be object shifted. The examples in 12 are Anagnostopoulou’s 161, originally from Collins and Thráinsson 1996:415. In 12b, I have added the negation to show the ungrammaticality of object shift. (12) a. Hann gaf konunginum ambáttina ekki He.NOM gave king-the.DAT maidservant-the.ACC not ‘He did not give the king the maidservant.’ b. Hann gaf (ekki) ambáttina He.NOM gave (not) maidservant-the.ACC
(ekki) (not)
konunginum (*ekki) king-the.DAT (*not) *‘He did not give the maidservant the king.’ Accordingly, these verbs have symmetric passives. (13) a. Konunginum var gefin ambáttin king-the.DAT was given maidservant-the.NOM ‘The king was given the maidservant.’ b. Ambáttin var gefin konunginum Maidservant-the.NOM was given king-the.DAT *‘The maidservant was given the king.’ Verbs in the other class do not participate in the inversion construction, and therefore do not have the symmetric passive. Nevertheless, even though verbs in the former class all have the symmetric passive, not all of them seem to participate in the inversion construction. One of these verbs is lána ‘lend’. (Note that Anagnostopoulou, p. 199, example 171b, brings an example from Collins and Thráinsson 1996 that is parallel to 14c. My six informants and I do not share their grammaticality judgments.) The examples in 14 show that
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with lána ‘lend’, the IO must precede the DO even though the IO is stressed, as in 14c. (14) a. Hann lánai (ekki) bóndanum (ekki) He lent (not) farmer-the.DAT (not) grafolann stud-the.ACC
(ekki) (not)
‘He did not lend the farmer the stud.’ b. *Hann lánai (ekki) grafolann (ekki) bóndanum (ekki) He lent (not) stud-the.ACC (not) farmer-the.DAT (not) c. *Hann lánai (ekki) grafolann (ekki) bóndanum (ekki) He lent (not) stud-the.ACC (not) farmer-the.DAT (not) The examples in 15, however, show that the verb lána has a symmetric passive. In 15a, the dative goal, bóndanum ‘the farmer’, has raised to the subject position. In 15b the nominative theme, grafolinn ‘the stud’, has raised to the subject position. It is necessary to embed the passive sentences in a question to avoid V2 effects, such as the possibility of topicalization. Note also that if 15b were derived from the inversion construction, the prediction would be that the dative goal should be focused or stressed. This is not the case in either 13b or 15b. (15)
Hún vill vita … She wants know … ‘She would like to know …’
a. hvort bóndanum hafi ekki veri lánaur grafolinn whether farmer-the.DAT has not been lent stud-the.NOM ‘whether the farmer has not been lent the stud.’ b. hvort grafolinn hafi ekki veri lánaur bóndanum farmer-the.DAT whether stud-the.NOM has not been lent ‘whether the farmer has not been lent the stud.’ Apparently, in some respects the verb lána ‘lend’ behaves like verbs that do not allow the symmetric passive (because it does not occur in the inversion construction). However, in other respects it seems to behave
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like verbs that allow the symmetric passive (because both of its internal arguments may raise to the subject position). Since lána does not occur in the inversion construction, the derivation of 15b is problematic for Anagnostopoulou’s analysis. As she argues (chapter 3, section 8.2.1), vAPPL does not allow for an additional specifier in Icelandic (this also explains why Icelandic does not have non-parallel object shift as found in Norwegian and Swedish). If vAPPL allowed for an additional specifier, the nominative argument and the dative argument would be in the same minimal domain and the nominative argument could move to the outer specifier of v without violating locality conditions on Amovement. After having moved to the outer specifier of v, the nominative argument could move on to T. Since vAPPL does not allow for an additional specifier in Icelandic, the movement of the nominative argument across the dative argument in constructions such as 15b violates the MLC. Finally, let us turn to multiple specifiers and “tucking in”. I will not discuss the usual arguments against multiple specifiers; for example, that multiple specifiers pose a learnability problem as it can be difficult to figure out whether the structure is made of one projection with two specifiers or two projections with an empty head in the higher projection. Instead, I am concerned with the linear order of multiple specifiers. Anagnostopoulou assumes (following many others) that the negation and sentence medial adverbs mark the left edge of vP in Scandinavian. Object shift is then movement into an outer specifier, above the negation. If both objects in a double object construction are object shifted, the DO “tucks in” between the IO and the negation (the tree in 16 is Anagnostopoulou’s example 234, p. 155; I have added the negation). First, the IO moves to an outer specifier of v1P. Since the IO does not intervene anymore, the DO can object shift and “tuck in” below the IO.
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(16)
v1P
IO
v1P DO
v1P NEG
v1P Subj
v’ v-TR
v2P tIO
v’ vAPPL V
VP tDO
The negation occupies an extra specifier between the specifier into which the DO has been shifted and the specifier in which the subject is base-generated. Putting aside the argument that if the negation truly marks the left edge of vP, it should precede the objects, I do not understand the mechanism that regulates the linear order of the specifiers. In theory, it should be possible for the DO to “tuck in” below the negation, creating the word order IO–NEG–DO–SUBJ, a word order that does not exist in Scandinavian (unless the subject has been heavy NP shifted). It does, however, seem that the order is always fixed. Note, for instance, that negative shift in Swedish induces a freezing effect on double object shift (Ken Ramshøj Christensen, personal communication). If the IO is negative in Swedish, the only possible order is the one in 17a; that is, IO > DO. Non-parallel object shift in the presence of a negative object, as in 17b, is ungrammatical. (17) a. Jag gav honom intet ofta I gave him nothing often ‘I didn’t give him anything often.’ b. *Jag I
gav gave
intet nothing
honom him
ofta often
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The usual assumption (see Koch Christensen 1991; Christensen 2003a,b,c, and references there) is that the negative object in Scandinavian occupies the same position as the sentential negation, which evidently shows that object shift must target a position above negation, and not below it (otherwise examples such as 17b could be grammatical in Scandinavian). It therefore seems to me that some extra assumptions are needed to regulate the linear order of the specifiers. Alternatively, and perhaps also desirably, object shift should be accounted for by means other than multiple specifiers. In spite of the problems I have touched upon here, Anagnostopoulou’s study is an extremely important contribution to the understanding of the double object construction. In addition, the book is very interesting because it raises important questions about the theoretical make-up of the Minimalist Program. This book should not only be recommended to those who are interested in the syntax of ditransitives, but to all linguists; not least because it is a showcase of what solid and thorough argumentation should look like. I really enjoyed reading this book. REFERENCES Baker, Mark. C. 2001. The atoms of language: The mind’s hidden rules of grammar. New York: Basic Books. Boeckx, Cedric 2004. Review of The syntax of ditransitives: Evidence from clitics, by Elena Anagnostopoulou 2003. Journal of Linguistics 40.149–153. Bonet, Eulàlia 1991. Morphology after syntax: Pronominal clitics in Romance languages. Doctoral dissertation, MIT. Bonet, Eulàlia 1994. The person-case constraint: A morphological approach. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 22: The morphology-syntax connection, 33–52. Chomsky, Noam 1995. The minimalist program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chomsky, Noam 2000. Minimalist inquiries: The framework. Step by step, ed. by Roger Martin, David Michaels and Juan Uriagereka, 89–155. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chomsky, Noam 2001. Derivation by phase. Ken Hale: A life in language, ed. by Michael Kenstowicz, 1–52. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Christensen, Ken Ramshøj. 2003a. NEG-shift and repair strategies: Pied piping vs. preposition stranding. Unpublished ms., University of Aarhus. Christensen, Ken Ramshøj. 2003b. NEG-shift in the Scandinavian languages and English. Unpublished ms., University of Aarhus.
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Christensen, Ken Ramshøj. 2003c. On the synchronic and diachronic status of the negative adverbial ikke ‘not’. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 72. 1–53. Collins, Chris and Höskuldur Thráinsson. 1996. VP-internal structure and object shift in Icelandic. Linguistic Inquiry 27.391–444. D’Alessandro, Roberta, A. G. 2003. Impersonal si constructions: Agreement and interpretation. Doctoral dissertation, University of Stuttgart. Falk, Cecilia 1990. On double object constructions. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 46.53–100. Holmberg, Anders 1991. On the Scandinavian double object construction. Papers from the 12th Scandinavian conference of linguistics, 141–155. Reykjavík: Institute of Linguistics, University of Iceland. Holmberg, Anders and Christer Platzack. 1995. The role of inflection in Scandinavian syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holmberg, Anders and Thorbjörg Hróarsdóttir. 2003. Agreement and movement in Icelandic raising constructions. Lingua 113.997–1019. (Republished as Holmberg and Hróarsdóttir 2004.) Holmberg, Anders and Thorbjörg Hróarsdóttir. 2004. Agreement and movement in Icelandic raising constructions. Lingua 114.651–673. Hrafnbjargarson, Gunnar Hrafn 2004. Oblique subjects and stylistic fronting in the history of Scandinavian and English: The role of IP-Spec. Doctoral dissertation, University of Aarhus. Kayne, Richard 1975. French syntax: The transformational cycle. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Koch Christensen, Kirsti 1991. AGR, adjunction, and the structure of Scandinavian existential sentences. Lingua 84.137–158. Marantz, Alec 1993. Implications of asymmetries in double object constructions. Theoretical aspects of Bantu grammar, ed. by Sam A. Mchombo, 113–150. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. Perlmutter, David M. 1971. Deep and surface structure constraints in syntax. New York: Rinehart and Winston Inc. Sigursson, Halldór Ármann 1989. Verbal syntax and case in Icelandic. Doctoral dissertation, Lund University. Sigursson, Halldór Ármann 1996. Icelandic finite verb agreement. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 57.1–46.
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The Text Laboratory Department of Linguistics University of Oslo P.O.Box 1102 Blindern 0317 Oslo Norway [
[email protected]]
Morphological Change Up Close. Two and a Half Centuries of Verbal Inflection in Nuremberg. By David Fertig. (Linguistische Arbeiten, 422.) Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2000. Pp. ix, 179. Paper. 52. Reviewed by BRIAN D. JOSEPH, The Ohio State University There are (at least) two types of data-oriented linguists: those who go for data across lots of languages and those who go for lots of data within a single language. David Fertig is clearly a linguist of the second type, as he has put together a masterful and painstakingly detailed study of verbal inflection in the German dialect of Nuremberg in the period between 1356 and 1619, thus based on data which Fertig characterizes as “drawn from a single local variety of a single language” (p. 1). The data for this study come from a collection of texts Fertig assembled consisting of letters, journals, diaries, reports, treatises, bookkeeping records, and protocols, and for all of the items included, a fairly accurate dating was possible, as was the identification of the author. While Fertig gives a remarkably in-depth description of verbal inflection in his well-defined corpus, his goals are not (merely) descriptive in nature. In fact, as he states his aims, they are “to build a theoretical investigation of morphological change on a solid empirical foundation” (p. 1). Clearly, as the above account of the corpus indicates, the empirical foundation he works with is solid, and then some! Fertig is aware of the fact that one can sometimes drown, as it were, in too much data (see on this point Lass 1997, who, as Klein (1999:88–89) puts it, seems to believe that “despite our interest in taking into account as much data as possible in applying the comparative method, too much data can sometimes be a hindrance in that it may muddle the picture by making it
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harder to know what forms to take as input to the method.”). Yet, Fertig realizes, wisely I would say, that a rich database is perhaps the only way that the historical linguist can overcome the basic problem faced by those engaged in analyzing language history, stated by Labov (1972:100) as the need “to make the best of […] bad data—‘bad’ in the sense that it may be fragmentary, corrupted, or many times removed from the actual production of native speakers.” As a result, we are treated here to a study with an exhaustive basis—Fertig included in the database “every token of every verb that occurs in this collection of nearly one-half million words, about 86,000 tokens in all” (p. 1)—and with a foundation like this, it is fair to say that any theoretical conclusions Fertig reaches inspire confidence. After two brief introductory chapters about the overall goals and the nature of the corpus, Fertig lays out in chapter 3 his views about language change and especially morphological change. This chapter is well thought out, and contains some provocative and downright iconoclastic ideas. Rejecting the semiotic principle of “one-form-to-onemeaning” as a viable principle of morphology, Fertig argues for the SEPARATION HYPOTHESIS and suggests that “indirect, conditional, nonone-to-one mapping between function (or meaning) and form is [to be] regarded as normal and expected in morphology” (p. 16). He goes on to take issue with the importance that some (see, for example, Bybee 1985) have placed on diagrammatic iconicity (involving the extent to which fusion of a stem with an inflectional marker reflects the relative semantic relevance of each piece to the lexical item’s meaning, to dispute the rareness of exaptation (Lass 1990’s term for the reuse of linguistic “detruitus” by speakers in novel yet rational ways), to reassess the relationship of analogy and rules, and to emend the definition of paradigm leveling to “the paradigm-internally motivated elimination of an allomorphic stem alternation” (p. 32). This last point is especially important since, as he notes (p. 31), “a very high proportion of the changes in verbal inflection observable in the Nuremberg texts involve [sic] what is traditionally referred to as analogical or paradigm(atic) leveling.” He also recognizes the importance of blends and hypercorrection (which he sees as “a kind of analogical development”, p. 37) for the data in his corpus, but is doubtful about traditional typologies of analogical change.
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At this point in the book Fertig takes me to task for my lumping “all types of ‘change due to the influence of one form on another’ […] together under the heading ‘analogy’” (in Joseph 1998:362), saying that such “a practice […] has led to the frequent criticism of analogy as a ‘catchall’ term for processes that do not really have anything interesting in common” (p. 36). Let me offer, as a brief excursus, the following defense of my approach. My claim is that various changes, including such traditionally recognized phenomena as paradigm leveling, formclass (external) analogy, contamination (blending), re-compounding (renewal), reanalysis, and even folk etymology, do have much in common. For example, they are typically sporadic (as opposed to the regularity of sound change), typically show the involvement of some other form and a perceived relation to that other form (whereas sound change is impervious to such perceived relations), and typically are embedded in some grammatical subsystem of the language (whereas sound change is blind to grammatical involvement). We might add as well that these characteristics show these changes to have a psychological/cognitive grounding, whereas sound change can be seen as strictly phonetic and physiological in nature. This approach may indeed represent the defining of analogy “negatively as whatever is not sound change, semantic change, or borrowing,” a practice Fertig is clearly not impressed by, but so be it—to me, these characteristics represent valid properties of this otherwise disparate assortment of changes and show how they cohere as a group as opposed to other classes of changes with their own motivating factors (such as physiological ones, in the case of sound change, or social ones, as in the case of borrowing and diffusion more generally). To return to Fertig’s study, chapters 4 through 7 constitute the core of the presentation and analysis of the data. Chapter 4 offers first a detailed look at the inflectional endings, organized by person and number, with a special section on the 1st and 3rd plural forms of the present of sein ‘be’, whereas chapter 5 treats stem alternations. In this latter chapter, the organizing principle is essentially strong versus weak verbs, with a separate treatment of the modals, wissen ‘know’ and tun ‘do’, with discussion of stem-final consonant alternations as well (for instance, Verner’s Law alternations). The theoretical point to be drawn from chapter 5 has to do with directionality in leveling, and Fertig finds that the notions of “local markedness and relative token frequency”
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(espoused, among others, by Tiersma 1982 and Bybee 1994) do “not appear to be applicable to the cases of leveling in verbal morphology” seen in the Nuremberg corpus (p. 107). Chapter 6 examines shifts that some verbs show between inflectional classes, a phenomenon that provides an interesting test—and to some extent confirmation—of the theory of inflectional class stability advocated by Wurzel (1984) wherein the importance of the stem vowel in determining inflectional class membership was stressed. Chapter 7 focuses on the ge- participial prefix, clarifying, among other things, some aspects of the absence of this prefix where it might otherwise be expected. In his concluding chapter, Fertig makes an important nod in the direction of sociolinguistics and variation and how change is to be understood in this context. Given the acuity of his remarks throughout the book, and the general reasonableness of what he says in this chapter, with its reference to usage differences seen in “the opposition between the chancery and administrators, on the one hand, and the women, on the other” (p. 144), one can only regret that this chapter is so short, a mere four and a half pages! Healthy iconoclasm is found here too, as Fertig concludes, following Labov 1989, that while there is a relation between variation and change, “the earlier view equating variation with change in progress is now obsolete” (p. 147). This work is clearly written and very cleanly produced, with only a few typographical errors at most. There is no index—a minor failing— but Fertig does include an extensive (17-page!) bibliography, and three appendices, one a ten-page verb frequency list giving the frequency of occurrence for every verb in the corpus (not surprisingly, sein ‘be’ and haben ‘have’ are the two most common, followed by werden ‘become’ wollen ‘want’, sollen ‘ought to’, lassen ‘let’, kommen ‘come’, tun ‘do’, and schreiben ‘write’, to round out the top ten), one a two-page sampling of lines from his data tables, and the last a two-page listing of sources for the texts in his collection. All in all, this is a most satisfying contribution to our understanding both of the development of German verbal inflection and of the nature of morphological change. Despite the appeal of broad cross-linguistic surveys, real progress in our field is made, I would say, with fine-grained exhaustive studies of the sort that this excellent and provocative work represents.
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REFERENCES Bybee, Joan. 1985. Morphology. A study of the relation between meaning and form. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bybee, Joan. 1994. Morphological universals and change. The encyclopedia of language and linguistics, vol. 5, ed. by R. E. Asher and J. M. Y. Simpson, 2557–2562. New York: Pergamon. Joseph, Brian D. 1998. Diachronic morphology. The handbook of morphology, ed. by Andrew Spencer and Arnold M. Zwicky, 351–373. Oxford: Blackwell. Klein, Jared S. 1999. Theory vs. practice in diachronic linguistics. Review of Historical linguistics and language change, by Roger Lass 1997. Language Sciences 21.87–104. Labov, William. 1972. Some principles of linguistic methodology. Language in Society 1.97–120. Labov, William. 1989. The child as linguistic historian. Language Variation and Change 1.85–97. Lass, Roger. 1990. How to do things with junk: Exaptation in language evolution. Journal of Linguistics 26.79–102. Lass, Roger. 1997. Historical linguistics and language change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tiersma, Peter. 1982. Local and general markedness. Language 58.832–849. Wurzel, Wolfgang Ullrich. 1984. Flexionsmorphologie und Natürlichkeit. Berlin: Akademie.
Department of Linguistics 222 Oxley Hall The Ohio State University Columbus, OH 43210-1298 USA [
[email protected]]
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Clausal Syntax of German. By Judith Berman. Stanford: CSLI Publications, 2003. Pp. iii, 187. Paper. $25.00. Reviewed by ANNIE ZAENEN, Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) This monograph discusses some of the major problems in German syntax from the Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) perspective codified in Bresnan 2001. Although there are some LFG papers that discuss phenomena in German syntax and there is an older introduction by Berman and Frank (1996), there was until now no book-length work in the LFG framework that focuses uniquely on the syntax of German. This work, although still a rather slender volume, changes this state of affairs. After an introduction to LFG based on Bresnan 2001 the book provides a treatment of some often, and some less, discussed phenomena and spells out their relevance to LFG theory. Chapter 3 (the first substantial one) translates the topological model of German sentence structure into a phrase structure model with functional projections, and centers on the problem of whether German has an IP along with a CP. Following mainly arguments given by Haider (1991, 1997), Berman adopts a non-IP analysis. She also follows Haider in proposing a flat structure for the clause final verbal complex. In the course of this chapter, Berman assumes, without much discussion, that German follows the endocentric mapping principles of Bresnan 2001 for the projections of C. This means that she assumes that these German c-to-f-structure mappings are configurational. For the projections of V, she also proposes several levels of VP embedding, but does not clearly say which role they play, because she proposes that the grammatical functions in the middle field are identified through lexicocentric function specification (case marking). Various levels of VPs in the middle field are often proposed in GB to account for the different partial VP-fronting possibilities, but LFG does not need this device. Chapter 4 argues that although German has no subject position it requires a subject function in every sentence. Given the obvious absence of overt subjects in several types of German sentences, that point of view needs to be supported. Berman adapts to LFG a proposal made in GB, namely that the 3rd person marking on the tensed verb in ostensibly subjectless sentences constitutes the subject. In zu-infinitives with anaphoric control, the subject function with a “PRO” value is introduced
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by a functional equation on the zu and in clauses with functional control via the functional control itself. As the discussion shows, the LFG machinery makes it very easy to introduce categories in the functional structure that do not have a corresponding c-structure. This makes clear arguments for such categories desirable. Berman shows that her proposals can be made work. However, she does not show that they solve any problems, such as the occurrence of nominative phrases in infinitives (for example, einer nach dem anderen ‘one after the other’), in a more elegant or economic way than other alternatives. Still, following GB tradition, she tries to link her treatment of verbal inflection as introducing a subject to a typology of languages with and without overt subjects. She contrasts Scandinavian languages without verb agreement with German to account for the obligatoriness of overt subjects in the former. However, she also classifies Dutch as a language with obligatory overt subjects; but it is well known that this is the wrong generalization for the majority dialect, where the expletive is optional. Moreover, it creates a problem for her account, as the morphology of Dutch is rich enough to allow the subject to be absent in the c-structure. Of course, the optionality of the Dutch expletive also creates a problem for the proposal advocated. Chapters 5 is likely the most interesting for readers focusing on LFG theory rather than on German syntax because it discusses the introduction of empty c-structure categories (traces), a relative novelty in the theory. Berman follows Bresnan 2001 in proposing a limited set of empty c-structure categories in LFG on the basis of a study of weak crossover phenomena. The arguments follow Bresnan 2001 rather closely for long distance crossover (Bresnan’s account in turn is based in part on an earlier paper by Berman). The account relies on empty cstructure categories to handle contrasts such as that between 1 and 2. (1)
Who said that he consoled his mother?
(2)
a. *Wen sagte seine Mutter habe who said his mother have
sie she
getröstet? consoled
b. *Who did his mother say that she consoled? The argument is based on the assumption that one needs to refer to linear order to state the exact conditions on the grammaticality of such
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crossover configurations. Bresnan (2001) motivates the need for empty categories in long distance dependencies by the mapping principles from c-to-f-structure, which state that in languages such as English, GF are mapped from configurationally identified c-structures. Berman assumes the same account for German. Berman accounts for the difference in grammaticality between German and English sentences, such as those found in 3, by assuming a different status for German local subjects and local topicalization: they are in the domain of lexicocentric function specification (identification through case marking). (3) a. … dass that
seine Mutter jeder mag. his mother everyone likes
b. Seine Mutter mag jeder. his mother likes everyone. c. *His mother everyone likes. The proposal then assumes that there needs to be a trace in the German middle field to account for long distance crossover, but given the lack of crossover effects within the middle field it can be anywhere. The contrast between English and German with respect to object crossover is covered by some not very well-worked out but not implausible assumptions about constraints on argument structure. Berman discusses the counterproposal of Dalrymple et al. 2001 that does not require traces, but rejects it because it does not rely on the endrocentric mapping principles and the morphological function specification proposed in Bresnan 2001. It seems rather frivolous to accept a major revision of the theory and the whole philosophy of LFG without discussing in detail exactly what damage the Dalrymple et al. 2001 proposal does to the architecture of the c-structure to f-structure mappings. As far as I know, the long distance crossover facts are the only argument for traces in German (and any other language). One cannot reject a counter analysis by simply saying that it would contradict assumptions that are made only to make one’s own analysis possible. The assumption that German is an endocentric (configurational) language in the relevant aspects, and the c-to-f-structure mapping principles defined in Bresnan 2001 make it impossible to account for
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long distance dependencies without traces, and this is the path that Berman follows without further discussion in chapter 6. In light of these assumptions, she discusses both a functional uncertainty and a cyclic approach with iterating local dependencies without adducing data that would clearly favor one over another. In chapter 7, “Distribution of Sentential Subjects”, Berman defends two claims: that all embedded tensed clauses in German are at the periphery (left-dislocated or extraposed), and that clauses have the same grammatical functions as nominal arguments, so that one can dispense with the COMP function. I find this chapter rather badly organized and do not understand very well what these two claims have to do with each other. What follows is my best attempt to make sense of it. The claim that sentential arguments have the same grammatical functions as nominal ones is based on a reconsideration of arguments presented in Dalrymple and Lødrop 2000, who propose a mixed analysis where some clauses are COMPs and others are OBJs. Berman argues that some of their arguments rest on the wrong examples, and that when the right examples are chosen it can be argued that that-clauses in German can be OBJs or OBLs, and that none need to be assumed to be COMPs. An argument in favor of COMP-clauses given in Dalrymple and Lødrup 2000 is based on the contrast between 4 and 5. (4) Dass die Erde rund ist, (das) hat that the earth round is that has ‘That the earth is round surprised him.’ (5)
ihn gewundert. him surprised
Dass die Erde rund ist, *(darüber) hat sie sich gewundert. that the earth round is *it-about has she herself surprised. ‘That the earth is round, she was surprised about that’
The assumption here is that OBJs can be topicalized, whereas COMPs cannot. Berman proposes to reanalyze apparent sentential topicalization as left-dislocation with deletion of the resumptive pronoun, which is seen as a case of topic drop. As Berman observes, this analysis is an LFG adaptation of an analysis proposed for Dutch by Koster (1978) and for German by Oppenrieder (1991). As topic drop is only possible with subjects and (accusative) objects, it accounts for the contrasts above.
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Note, however, that this treatment of “topicalized” that-clauses does not require the assumed function assignment: left-dislocated elements are not assumed to have the same function as the element that they are anaphorically connected to. In fact they are generally assumed to have only a discourse function and no subcategorized one.1 This, of course, is no argument against the proposed analysis, only against the way the argument is structured. Things become more puzzling if one looks at the second position where that-clauses can occur: extraposed in the Nachfeld. This is a position where nominal elements cannot occur. As sentences are not morphologically marked, we need to develop new positions to identify them. Berman proposes to right adjoin them to the VP. However, again this is not a position for other subcategorized arguments, so it does not jibe with the proposal that that-clauses have the same function as nominal arguments. Here I would rather argue that this is an argument against this proposal, as maintaining it weakens the mapping theory. What then are the arguments in favor of OBJ and OBL function? They are the ones developed in Dalrymple and Lødrop 2000: alternation with a nominal object, passivization, and coordination. However, passive sentences can be analyzed as involving topicalization/left-dislocation as above. Alternations have to be allowed in general, so the main argument is coordination. Here Berman makes the interesting observation that the (a) versions of the following sentences are grammatical, whereas the (b) versions are not. (6) a. Ich informierte ihn über die Situation I informed him about the situation und dass and that
Hans krank Hans sick
ist. is
‘I informed him about the situation and that Hans is sick.’
1
The structure that Berman proposes for “topicalized” that-clauses might be closer to that of contrastive dislocation construction as described in Thráinsson 1979, Zaenen 1997 and Grohmann 2000 for German, but that type of construction is not discussed anywhere.
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b. *Ich informierte ihn, dass Hans krank ist I informed him that Hans sick is und über and over
die Situation. the situation
(7) a. Er vergass die Verabredung und dass es wichtig war, he forgot the appointment and that it important was pünklich on-time
zu sein. to be
‘He forgot the appointment and that it was important to be on time.’ b. *Er he
vergass dass es wichtig war, pünklich zu sein forgot that it important was on-time to be
und die Verabredung. and the appointment However, she does not propose an analysis of this contrast. She suggests that the sentence final versions can be assumed to be extraposed, but if that is the case this would be the first clear violation of the coordinated constituent constraint, and if we are to assume null pronouns in the second constituent of the grammatical clauses it would be nice to have some arguments for them. To summarize: left-dislocated clauses do not need an OBJ or OBL function, extraposed ones do not pattern with nominal OBJs or OBLs, and so are no argument for a similarity in function. The contrasts in 6 and 7 might form the basis for an argument if identity of function is required for coordination, but they remain unexplained under the analysis given. The last substantial chapter discusses the occurrence of es with finite clauses. It is too complex to summarize, as it relies on six interacting assumptions, only one of which is specific to this discussion. It is a rather satisfying demonstration of the power of the framework developed in the previous chapters. The book ends with a summary and a list of some open problems.
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Overall, Clausal Syntax of German is a more than competent analysis of some major problems in German syntax in the LFG framework. From the discussion above, it is most likely clear that its main quality is not originality, which is not surprising given that this is a reworked doctoral dissertation. The lack of originality is potentially positive because specialists in German syntax could read the book to familiarize themselves with LFG, as it allows one to see clearly what is common to previous analyses and what is specific to LFG. Most of the discussion is clear and coherent, adapted ideas are correctly attributed to their original authors, and problems are clearly flagged. Together with Bresnan 2001, this work constitutes an excellent source for anyone who wants to teach an introduction to LFG with German data. REFERENCES Berman, Judith and Anette Frank. 1996. Deutsche and Französische Syntax im Formalismus der LFG. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Bresnan, Joan. 2001. Lexical-functional syntax. Oxford: Blackwell. Dalrymple, Mary and Helge Lødrup. 2000. The grammatical functions of complement clauses. Proceedings of the LFG ’00 conference, ed. by Miriam Butt and Tracy H. King, 82–103. http://www-csli.stanford.edu/publications/ LFG/5/lfg00.html. Dalrymple, Mary, Ron Kaplan, and Tracy H. King. 2001. Weak crossover and the absence of traces. Proceedings of the LFG ’01 conference. ed. by Miriam Butt and Tracy H. King, 66–82. http://www-csli.stanford.edu/publications/ LFG/6/lfg01.html. Grohmann, Kleanthes. 2000. Copy left dislocation. Proceedings of the 19th West Coast conference on formal linguistics, ed. by Roger Billerey and Danielle Lillehaugen. 139–152. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. Haider, Hubert. 1991 Fakultativ kohärente Infinitkonstruktionen im Deutschen. Technical Report 17, Universität Stuttgart. Haider, Hubert. 1997. Projective economy: On the minimal functional structure of the German clause. German: Syntactic problems – problematic syntax, ed. by Werner Abraham and Elly van Gelderen. 83–103, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Koster, Jan. 1978. Why subject sentences don’t exist. Recent transformational studies in European languages, ed. by Samuel J. Keyser. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Oppenrieder, Wilhelm. 1991. Von Subjekten, Sätzen und Subjektsätzen. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.
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Thráinsson, Höskuldur. 1979. On complementation in Icelandic. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Cambridge/New York: Garland Publishers. Zaenen, Annie. 1997. Contrastive dislocation in Dutch and Icelandic. Materials on left dislocation, ed. by Elena Anagnostopoulou, Henk van Riemsdijk, and Frans Zwarts. 119–148, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Annie Zaenen Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) 3333, Coyote Hill Road Palo Alto, CA 94304 USA [
[email protected]]
Journal of Germanic Linguistics 17.1 (2005):39–75
REVIEWS
Prolific Domains: On the Anti-Locality of Movement Dependencies. By Kleanthes K. Grohmann. (Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 66). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2003. Pp. xiv, 369. Hardcover. $138.00. Reviewed by JUSTIN M. FITZPATRICK, Massachusetts Institute of Technology This monograph consists of a revision of the author’s doctoral dissertation, with the addition of extensions and related work by the author and collaborators. In this work Grohmann makes the interesting suggestion that along with STANDARD LOCALITY (the familiar upper bound on the length of syntactic dependencies), movement dependencies are subject to a lower bound, that is, ANTI-LOCALITY. This suggestion is implemented through a partition of the clause into three parts (roughly the theta-domain, the agreement domain, and the left periphery) and some simple conditions on movement between and within these domains. The result is a new candidate proposal in the realm of multiple/cyclic spell-out theories that provides a novel analysis of anaphora in several domains, as well as of left dislocation of various types. Although the proposal also has interesting theoretical implications (for example, a less stipulative ban on “improper movement”), it suffers from some empirical and theoretical shortcomings, which I will outline below. The Anti-Locality thesis introduced in chapter 1 is implemented through the theory of PROLIFIC DOMAINS. According to this theory, the clause consists of three parts, or domains, defined over familiar syntactic categories: (1) the -domain, in which -roles are discharged/assigned/ checked (material at and below the vP level), (2) the -domain, where agreement/-features are checked (material above the vP level including agreement projections (Agr), tense, and aspect), and (3) the -domain, the location of syntactically represented discourse roles, such as topic and focus (a finely articulated left periphery along the lines of Rizzi 1997). Anti-Locality states that movement cannot take place within a single Prolific Domain. To some extent, Anti-Locality could be viewed as a response to critics of the line of research that seeks to explain syntactic dependencies © Society for Germanic Linguistics
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in terms of movement rather than construal, chains, or accidental binding (Hornstein 2001, Kayne 2002, among others). Since Hornstein (2001) makes crucial use of movement to -position, critics might ask why, if such movement is allowed, we do not observe sentences such as 1a with the meaning of 1b, given the possibility of the movement operation in 1c where John is merged as theme and moves to the external argument position. (1) a. *John likes. b. John likes himself. c. [vP John v [VP likes
]]
The Anti-Locality framework provides a principled answer. Movement within a single Prolific Domain (in 1, movement from one theta position to another within the same VP) is too local. If independent evidence for Anti-Locality could be found, this critique of movement into theta position would then disappear. This book attempts to provide such evidence. However, it should be noted that were Hornstein to be wrong, much of Grohmann’s proposal would still be tenable. In chapter 2 the following is introduced as an explicit Anti-Locality condition: Condition on Domain Exclusivity (CDE) (p. 78) For a given Prolific Domain , an object O in the phrase-marker must receive an exclusive interpretation at the interfaces, unless duplicity of O yields a drastic effect on the output of . Putting aside for the moment what “duplicity” and “drastic” mean, the CDE essentially states that a given object can only appear once in a Prolific Domain. Grohmann attempts to explain this restriction as a ban on ambiguity at the PF interface. A phonological form for a given Prolific Domain must contain unambiguous instructions. If an object appears twice in the domain, as it would if it moves domain-internally, ambiguity arises. However, there is one way to circumvent the ban on domain-internal movement imposed by the CDE: an object can appear more than once in a Prolific Domain if one copy of the object is pronounced differently from the other. Grohmann calls this escape hatch
Journal of Germanic Linguistics 17.1 (2005)
COPY SPELL-OUT.
41
This is, presumably, what is meant by the vague “drastic effect” condition above. While there is an intuitively appealing aspect to Prolific Domains and the CDE, Grohmann’s explanation of the CDE in terms of a PF ban on duplicate spell-out suffers somewhat from his adoption of Nunes’ (1995) approach to copy theory and deletion. Nunes argues that, due to the Linear Correspondence Axiom (Kayne 1994), only one copy of a given syntactic object can be spelled out phonologically. Other copies, formed through movement (envisioned as copy+merger), must be deleted. Lower copies are generally deleted since they contain more unchecked features. But if copies can be deleted, it should be simple to circumvent the CDE and allow all sorts of domain-internal movement, as long as all copies (but one) are deleted. Grohmann addresses this concern to some extent by saying that unpronounced copies are not deleted, but ignored. This is presumably due to a spell-out algorithm (unspecified in the monograph) that determines for a given domain where a given phrase with multiple occurrences is spelled out. If this is true, then the adoption of Nunes’s approach to copy theory and deletion is only a hindrance. Grohmann’s work could be done by a simple remerger account of movement, without the problems introduced by a copy operation and subsequent deletion. Chapter 2 spells out the architecture of the system within which the Anti-Locality thesis is couched. The introductory material in the first two chapters might have benefited from additional editorial attention, as it may be vague and confusing at times. As such, it will be difficult to follow for readers not already familiar with recent work in minimalism. In fact, some of this material could have been omitted without affecting the book’s main proposals, although some material in chapter 2 becomes crucial later in the book. First, Grohmann argues against Chomsky’s (1995) proposal that little v is the locus of both external argument licensing and accusative case marking. Grohmann wishes to divorce the former, which is part of the -domain, from the latter, which is a related property. Second, Grohmann argues against the existence of multiple specifiers. The clausal architecture assumed here allows a single specifier for a given XP (formed either through direct merger or movement) and any number of adjuncts, which appear above the specifier and can only be formed through (external) merger. This approach to specifiers and adjuncts allows an account of certain facts
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about left dislocation addressed later in the book. However, when this issue is discussed, the reader is left wondering why one would wish to rule out multiple specifiers. Unsupported statements, such as “multiple specifiers are undesirable, do not buy us much empirically, and can be banned from the grammar” (p. 53) are even more puzzling, especially given much recent work on multiple specifiers (see, for example, Richards 1999). Following Chomsky (2000:116), Grohmann attempts to derive fundamental specifier-head, head-head, and head-complement relations through the use of what he calls the “Natural Relations” provided by merger. However, this attempt does not quite go through. While Grohmann is correct that the combination of SISTER and IMMEDIATELYCONTAIN, two relations that arguably fall out from the operation Merge, provides a natural account of the specifier-head relation, this same relation should hold between a head and the specifier of that head’s complement. Therefore, while Grohmann’s approach includes the SpecHead relation, it might be too permissive. Grohmann also argues for a greed-based over an attraction-based treatment of movement based on these relations. The SpecHead relation, viewed as ImmediatelyContain(Sister-Of (XP)), fits into a greed-based framework since it is the XP in the specifier position that checks features on the head, not the other way around. However, this deduction seems spurious to me. It is based on the assumption that the MotherDaughter relation (Immediately-Contain()) is fundamental, but the DaughterMother relation (Mother()) is not. Furthermore, the discussion is open to Chametsky’s (2003:200–201) critique that more “natural relations” are definable from these assumptions than are needed. Chapters 3 through 6 form the empirical core of the book. Chapter 3 presents a treatment of local anaphora as the result of too-local movement within the -domain, with Copy Spell-out of the lower trace as an anaphor, as in 2, where Copy Spell-out is shown as (X). (2)
[vP John v [VP likes John ( himself)]
This analysis is only available if movement to a theta position is possible, as it is in a system where theta roles are treated as features to be checked through merger or movement. This treatment of anaphora serves
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as a proof-of-concept of the CDE and Copy Spell-out in the -domain. It differs from other movement-based analyses of binding (see, for instance, Kayne 2002) in that the anaphor is not present prior to Copy Spell-out. In this chapter, anaphora in exceptional case marking contexts are also treated through Copy Spell-out, but in the -domain. The PF explanation of the CDE is challenged further if an analogous analysis applies to sentences that contain multiple anaphora, as in John is protecting himself from himself. Here one would expect the CDE to rule out multiple Copy Spell-out of John as himself. Grohmann acknowledges this problem, but provides no clear solution. Chapter 4 contains perhaps the most interesting empirical case study of the CDE and Copy Spell-out, namely that of left dislocation, including topicalization as in 3a, contrastive left dislocation (CLD) as in 3b, clitic left dislocation (CLLD) as in 3c, and two types of hanging topic left dislocation (HTLD), shown in 3d,e. (3) a. Diesen Mann mag ich this man know I ‘This man, I don’t know.’ b. Den Martin, den the Martin D-PRON
nicht. not
habe ich schon lange have I already long
German
German
nicht mehr gesehen. not anymore seen ‘Martin, I haven’t seen [him] in a long time.’ c. [Afton ton andra], dhen ton ksero. this the man not CLITIC know.1SG ‘This man, I don’t know [him].’ d. [Diese-r/-n Mann]—den/ihn habe ich this man PRON have I noch nie gesehen. yet never seen ‘This man, I’ve never seen him before.’
Greek
German
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e. [Diese-r/-n Mann]—ich habe this man I have
den/ihn
German
PRON
noch nie gesehen. yet never seen ‘This man, I’ve never seen him before.’ According to Grohmann, topicalization, CLD, and CLLD suggest that the left-dislocated XP is derived through movement from a clause internal position, while this is not true of HTLD. Evidence for this, some of it well-known, includes Case connectivity and reconstruction effects (binding of anaphora, bound variable readings, obviation of weak crossover) in the first three, but not in HTLD. Turning to CLD, we can ask how the left-dislocated XP could be moved from a clause-internal position when the resumptive pronoun (RP) is in the prototypical preverbal topic position, presumably moved from a clause-internal position. Grohmann suggests that the RP is the result of Copy Spell-out of a lower occurrence of XP within the -domain, as shown in 4. (4)
[CP XP [TopP XP (RP) V-Top0 [IP …XP… [vP …XP…]]]]
Here the dislocated XP moves to topic position (within the left-peripheral -domain), and then moves on to a “quasi-extra-sentential” CP projection. While it is not clear what this CP projection is, this movement is too local and only Copy Spell-out can make the derivation legitimate by the CDE. The assumptions regarding specifiers and adjuncts from chapter 2 allow an account of the ordering among HTLDed and CLDed XPs, where the former always appear to the left of the latter. One appealing aspect of Grohmann’s analysis of the demonstrative pronoun in CLD as the spell-out of a copy due to Anti-Locality is that resumptive pronouns now appear when standard (maximum-distance) locality is violated, as with islands for movement, and also when Anti-Locality is violated. This treatment of CLD might also provide an argument against chain formation as a plausible alternative to movement. In this case, one would have to posit a difference between chains in CLD and coreference (presumably also encoded with coindexation) in HTLD. Chapter 5 returns to CLLD and analyzes this phenomenon as Copy Spell-out in the -domain. Grohmann suggests that the CLLDed XP
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moves through two positions in an Agreement projection: one adjoined to the Agr head and one in the specifier of this head. The occurrence adjoined to the Agr head is spelled out as a clitic. The XP in [Spec,AgrP] then moves on to a left-peripheral topic position. (5)
[AgrP XP [Agr XP( Clitic)–Agr0] [vP …XP…]]
This analysis of CLLD is perhaps the book’s most problematic part. First, it predicts that all languages with CLLD should have clitic doubling. There is nothing inherent in 5 that would force XP to move on to a topic position, so the derivation should be possible in any clause. However, Italian is a classic example of a language with CLLD but no clitic doubling. Furthermore, since the left-dislocated XP does undergo movement to the -domain (presumably the domain of A-bar movement), the analysis falls to Cinque’s (1990) argument that if CLLD involves A-bar movement, it should license parasitic gaps, contrary to fact. The advantage of the CLD and CLLD analyses is that they would explain several observed differences between the two, as well as moving toward an account of why and in which languages these types of left dislocation should occur. Why does Copy Spell-out emerge as an anaphor in some cases, a pronoun in others, and a clitic in still others? Grohmann comes close to explaining this distinction by appeal to different domains: anaphors arise in the -domain, clitics in the -domain (when the language has Agrrelated clitics), and pronouns in the -domain. However, the analysis of ECM anaphors as arising in the -domain makes this line of reasoning less consistent. Furthermore, the author provides no explanation for why only lower copies undergo Copy Spell-out as a pronoun/anaphor/clitic. Grohmann alludes to a possible feature-based explanation along the lines of Nunes 1995, but, as noted above, Nunes’ assumptions may be problematic for the CDE theory. Chapter 6 summarizes Grohmann and Haegeman 2003 and extends the Copy Spell-out paradigm to the DP level, where Grohmann argues that the DP contains multiple Prolific Domains (analogous to clausal structure), and that domain-internal movement within the DP also triggers Copy Spell-out. The latter is used to account for pronominal possessor doubling in Germanic, as in German dem Vater sein Auto ‘the father’s car’ (lit. the father his car). If movement (and Copy Spell-out) is
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at play here, Hornstein’s (2003) suggestion that movement does not underlie control in DPs (as in John’s attempt PRO to leave) may be at risk. Chapter 7 presents some of the most interesting ideas of the book. Grohmann reviews the long history of research into syntactic cyclicity and develops a view of cyclicity in the Prolific Domains framework in the form of two generalizations. (6) a. Inter-Clausal Movement Generalization Movement across a clause boundary can only target a position within the same Prolific Domain as the source position. b. Intra-Clausal Movement Generalization Movement within a clause always targets the next highest Prolific Domain. The combination of 6a and 6b, together with the unnoted assumption that a syntactic object must have an occurrence in each clause between the highest and lower occurrence of that object, ensure a strongly falsifiable type of cyclicity. Moving phrases always target either the next highest clause-internal domain or the same domain in next highest clause. The result is a satisfying account of so-called “improper movement” (the ban on A-bar movement followed by A-movement) without simply stipulating that this type of movement is “improper”. Grohmann adopts a MULTIPLE SPELL-OUT approach that differs in crucial ways from both Uriagereka’s (1999) and the phase-based approach put forth by Chomsky (2000). In the Prolific Domains framework, each domain— (vP), (IP), and (CP)—is submitted to PF and LF computation after it is built. Cyclicity in movement is viewed as a fundamental property of this system, not as an accidental property of intervening heads, as in theories that incorporate the EPP as a trigger for movement. The principles in 6 predict that raising verbs embedded under control verbs should behave as if they were control verbs, a prediction that Grohmann claims is born out in English. For example, in 7a John is raised clause-internally from its first theta position to the -domain, from where it raises clause-internally to the -domain of the raising verb seem. However, from here John would have to move to the -domain of the control verb hope, a move ruled out by 6b. Therefore, the derivation
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must be as in 7b, where John moves from -domain to -domain until it reaches hope. This entails that John must be an argument of seem, and so seem must behave like a control verb, a prediction Grohmann claims is born out. (7) John hopes to seem to be intelligent. a. *[ John hopes [ John to [ seem [ John to be [ John intelligent]]]]] b. [ John hopes [ to [ John seem [ to be [ John intelligent]]]]] But this prediction does not hold up cross-linguistically. Rizzi (1986) shows that a coreferential anaphor can appear between an NP and a controlled PRO, as in 8a, but not between an NP and its trace position in raising, as in 8b. (8) a. Gianni1 si1 promette di [PRO1 essere diligente]. Gianni self promises to-be diligent ‘Gianni promises himself to be diligent.’ b. *Gianni1 si1 sembra [t1 essere inteligente]. Gianni self seems to-be intelligent ‘Gianni seems to himself to be intelligent.’ The discussion of 7 suggests that when embedded under a control verb (such as sperare), raising verbs (such as sembrare) should pattern with 8a. However, as shown in 9, this is not the case.1 (9) *Gianni1 spera di sembrarsi1 inteligente. Gianni hopes to-seem to-self intelligent ‘Gianni hopes to seem to himself to be intelligent.’ Further problems arise with this strict view of cyclicity if whadjuncts in the -domain must pass through the -domain on the way to their surface -domain position. The question is what type of agreement
1
My thanks to David Pesetsky for pointing out this argument to me, and to Enzo Moscati for the Italian data.
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forces adjunct movement to the -domain since most (all?) languages lack agreement with adjuncts. As a whole, the proposals of the book are thought provoking and appealing. Grohmann does a good job of motivating his proposals independently, so Anti-Locality does not become an ad hoc patch required by Hornstein’s (2001) treatment of control as movement. However, since it adopts many of Hornstein’s assumptions, the book is open to criticism along the lines of Landau 2003 and Culicover and Jackendoff 2001. The tripartite division of the clause has intuitive appeal, and Grohmann’s treatment of cyclicity within the three-domain system provides an interesting alternative in the realm of multiple spell-out theories. It also provides a satisfying ban on improper movement. While empirical and theoretical problems remain, they are outweighed by the book’s virtues and should serve as challenges to those pursuing a theory of AntiLocality. REFERENCES Chametsky, Robert A. 2003. Phrase structure. Minimalist syntax, ed. by Randall Hendrick, 192–225. Oxford: Blackwell. Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The minimalist program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chomsky, Noam. 2000. Minimalist inquiries: The framework. Step by step, ed. by Roger Martin, David Michaels, and Juan Uriagereka, 89–156. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cinque, Guglielmo. 1990. Types of A-bar dependencies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Culicover, Peter and Ray Jackendoff. 2001. Control is not movement. Linguistic Inquiry 32.493–511. Grohmann, Kleathes and Liliane Haegeman. 2003. Resuming reflexives. Nordlyd 31. Proceedings of the19th Scandinavian conference in linguistics, ed. by Anne Dahl, Kristine Bentzen, and Peter Svenonius, 46–62. Hornstein, Norbert. 2001. Move! A minimalist theory of construal. Oxford: Blackwell. Hornstein, Norbert. 2003. On control. Minimalist syntax, ed. by Randall Hendrick, 6–81. Oxford: Blackwell. Kayne, Richard. 1994. The anti-symmetry of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kayne, Richard. 2002. Pronouns and their antecedents. Derivation and explanation in the minimalist program, ed. by Samuel David Epstein and T. Daniel Seely, 133–166. Oxford: Blackwell. Landau, Idan. 2003. Movement out of control. Linguistic Inquiry 34.471–498.
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Nunes, Jairo. 1995. The copy theory of movement and linearization of chains in the minimalist program. Doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland. Richards, Norvin. 1999. Featural cyclicity and the ordering of multiple specifiers. Working minimalism, ed. by Samual David Epstein and Norbert Hornstein, 127–158. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rizzi, Luigi. 1986. On chain formation. The syntax of pronominal clitics. Syntax and semantics, vol. 19, ed. by Hagit Borer, 65–95. New York: Academic Press. Rizzi, Luigi. 1997. The fine structure of the left periphery. Elements of grammar: Handbook of generative syntax, ed. by Liliane Haegeman, 281– 337. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Uriagereka, Juan. 1999. Multiple spell out. Working minimalism, ed. by Samuel David Epstein and Norbert Hornstein, 251–282. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. 32-D866 MIT 77 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02139 USA [
[email protected]]
The Syntax of Ditransitives: Evidence from Clitics. By Elena Anagnostopoulou. (Studies in Generative Grammar, 54). BerlinNew York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003. Pp. xiv, 379. Hardcover. $114.40. Reviewed by GUNNAR HRAFN HRAFNBJARGARSON, University of Oslo “The fundamental challenge of comparative linguistics is to find a way of doing justice to both the similarities and the differences without contradiction, without empty compromise, and without sacrificing one truth to the other” (Baker 2001:16). It is my belief that Anagnostopoulou has managed to do this in her book in such a way that it can only be admired. The topic that Anagnostopoulou has chosen is—to put it mildly—rather complex, and as to complicate things even more, Anagnostopoulou uses the entire theoretical apparatus provided by the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995), including multiple specifiers,
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“tucking in”, equidistance, minimal domains, EPP, long-distance agree, etc. (In fact, Boeckx (2004) criticizes Anagnostopoulou’s use of the whole range of theoretical apparatus.) Nevertheless, the book is very easy to read, and Anagnostopoulou’s argumentation is easy to follow. For example, it is the rule rather than the exception that she uses examples from many different languages in support of each of her claims. In this way, a reader like myself who sometimes finds it difficult to decode and understand the Greek (as well as the Romance) data, can be reassured by the fact that Anagnostopoulou usually elaborates on her claims by showing the direction the Germanic languages (Dutch, English, German and Scandinavian) choose to go. These languages sometimes follow Greek and/or Romance, and sometimes they choose an altogether different direction. Although the central focus of the book is on Greek clitic doubling and the Greek double object construction, in this review I am mainly concerned with Anagnostopoulou’s analysis of the Germanic languages, and in particular, passivization and object shift in Scandinavian and constructions with oblique (or quirky) subjects in Icelandic. First, I summarize the main theoretical claims that Anagnostopoulou makes. The book is divided into five chapters. In the first chapter, Anagnostopoulou briefly introduces the overall embracing claim of the book that a dative (the indirect object, henceforth IO) blocks movement of a lower nominative if “(i) the dative is higher than the base position of the nominative and (ii) not contained in the same domain as the nominative [...]” (p. 4). Thus, the derivation in 1 (Anagnostopoulou’s 2, p. 4) is ill-formed, whereas the derivation in 2 (Anagnostopoulou’s 3, p. 5) is well-formed because “the features of the dative move out of the way of the lower nominative [...] and thus the higher dative argument does not count anymore for locality.” (1)
[NOM [Domain DAT [Domain tNOM]]]
(2)
[NOM [DAT-Clitic [Domain tDAT-Clitic [Domain tNOM]]]] STEP I STEP II
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In the second chapter, Anagnostopoulou establishes the generalization reflected in 1 and 2 that in Greek a nominative DP may not move across a dative DP unless the dative DP is realized as a clitic or a part of a clitic doubling chain. Here too, the typology of ditransitives is investigated. Anagnostopoulou argues that two different types of double object constructions should be distinguished, based on where the IO is base-generated. According to Anagnostopoulou, an IO may either be base-generated high within the VP (only this construction qualifies as a true double object construction in Anagnostopoulou’s system) or it may be base-generated low within the VP (in which case it shows the characteristics of a prepositional dative). The crucial difference is, in Anagnostopoulou’s view (following Marantz 1993), that in addition to the main verbal root only the former (the true double object construction) contains a light applicative head (see 3). (3)
v1P SUB
v’ v-TR
v2P IO
v’ vAPPL
VP V
DO
In some languages the light applicative head (vAPPL) may assign morphological case to the IO, while in other languages it may not. vAPPL is also responsible for the different types of object shift found in the Scandinavian languages. Norwegian and Swedish differ from Danish and Icelandic in that the former allow for non-parallel object shift (that is, the order of the IO and the direct object, henceforth DO, can be reversed), whereas the latter only allow for parallel object shift. According to Anagnostopoulou, this difference is due to the fact that in Norwegian and Swedish, but not in Danish and Icelandic, vAPPL allows for an additional specifier position into which the DO can move on its way to the target position of object shift (an outer specifier of vP).
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The third chapter introduces the three “ingredients” that are needed for a locality-based account of ditransitives cross-linguistically; namely Case and the EPP, c-command, and minimal domains. In this chapter, Anagnostopoulou argues that equidistance (and not only closest ccommand) plays a crucial role in the notion of locality. For example, Amovement of derived subjects across higher goals or experiencers is ruled out in the passive when the two arguments are not in the same minimal domain, but such movement is allowed whenever the two arguments are in the same minimal domain, that is, are equidistant from the target position. In the fourth chapter, Anagnostopoulou shows how minimal link condition violations can be avoided if the dative DP is realized as a clitic, or if the dative DP is a part of a clitic doubling chain. In such constructions, movement is not ruled out because the cliticized or the clitic doubled argument is in the same minimal domain as the target of movement. In the fifth chapter, Anagnostopoulou discusses -feature checking in environments where a dative DP enters into a Move/Agree relation with T/transitive v. In particular, Anagnostopoulou discusses two types of person restrictions: the PERSON-CASE CONSTRAINT (PC-Constraint) and the PERSON RESTRICTION ON NOMINATIVE OBJECTS (PRNConstraint). The PC-Constraint is a restriction on clitics in Romance, Greek, Swiss German, Basque and many other languages (also known as the *me/lui or I-II constraint; see, for example, Perlmutter 1971, Kayne 1975, and Bonet 1991, 1994, among many others). Anagnostopoulou’s Greek examples (p. 252, 342) are found in 4. (Note that 4d is incorrectly translated in the book as they will send you to him). (4) a. Tha mu to FUT C1.GEN.1SG C1.ACC.3SG.NEUT ‘They will send it to me.’
stilune send.3PL
b. Tha su ton stilune FUT C1.GEN.2SG C1.ACC.3SG.MASC send.3PL ‘They will send him to you.’ c. *Tha to me stilune FUT C1.GEN.3SG.NEUT/MASC C1.ACC.1SG send.3PL ‘They will send me to him.’
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d. *Tha mu se stilune FUT C1.GEN.1SG C1.ACC.2SG send.3PL ‘They will send you to me.’ The PRN-Constraint is attested in Icelandic DAT-NOM constructions (that is, constructions where the subject is dative and the object is nominative), and in Italian impersonal si-constructions (compare D’Alessandro 2003). The PRN-Constraint prohibits agreement with nominative DPs in NOMINATIVE WITH INFINITIVE constructions (compare Sigursson 1989, 1996); that is, when the nominative DP is not in the same clause as the verb. The example in 5b shows that the verb can agree neither in person nor in number with the first person nominative DP. The example in 5a shows that such constructions are grammatical if the verb does not agree with the first person nominative DP. (5) a. Ykkur ótti ég /vi You.DAT.PL thought.3SG I.NOM/we.NOM ‘You found me/us amusing.’ b. *Ykkur You.DAT.SG
fyndin amusing
óttum /óttu vi fyndin thought.1PL/thought.3PL we.NOM amusing
The PRN-constraint also prohibits the occurrence of first and second person nominative objects. The example in 6 shows that nominative objects cannot be first person (the same holds for second person, but not for third person), even if the verb shows default agreement (compare Sigursson 1996 for a detailed discussion of the grammaticality of such examples; for me, they are ungrammatical). (6) *ér líkai / líkuum / líkuu vi You.DAT liked.3SG / liked.1PL / liked.3PL we.NOM Anagnostopoulou shows that although the PC-Constraint and the PRN-Constraint have many similarities, they differ in three crucial ways (p. 264). First, the PC-Constraint only holds if there is an external argument present, whereas the PRN-Constraint only holds if there is no external argument (Anagnostopoulou assumes that dative subjects are
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derived subjects, compare p. 275, tree 369).1 Second, the PC-Constraint, but not the PRN-Constraint affects weak elements, and finally, the “emergency strategies” induced by the two constraints are different. Romance and Greek “rescue” the respective construction by replacing the clitic with a strong pronoun, whereas in Icelandic the verb simply does not show agreement with the nominative DP. I turn now to what I think are the problematic aspects of Anagnostopoulou’s analysis of passivization and object shift in Scandinavian and Icelandic DAT-NOM constructions. As mentioned, the PRN-Constraint does two fairly different things at the same time. First, the PRN-Constraint regulates the agreement relationship between a verb and a nominative DP, which is not an object but the subject of a small clause. Second, the PRN-Constraint prohibits the occurrence of first/second person nominative objects. In Hrafnbjargarson 2004, I show that the PRN-Constraint can be accounted for in terms of the harmonic alignment of prominence hierarchies (person, case, and grammatical relation). The advantage of such an analysis is that the PRN-Constraint will only prohibit the occurrence of first and second person pronouns as nominative objects, whereas other constraints will regulate the impoverished agreement relationship between the verb and the nominative DP in Nominative with Infinitive constructions. Anagnostopoulou (p. 239ff.) also discusses the intervention effect of dative arguments in Icelandic. In DATIVE WITH INFINITIVE constructions, the matrix verb cannot show agreement with a nominative object in the lower clause. The example in 7 is Anagnostopoulou’s example 327. (7) Mér fannst /*fundust henni leiast Me.DAT seemed.3SG /seemed.3PL her.DAT be-bored ‘I thought she was bored with them.’
eir they.NOM
Anagnostopoulou (p. 240) also mentions that such intervention effects are not found in transitive expletive constructions where the associate of the expletive is a dative DP.
1
This assumption is rather appealing to me, as I think that it makes the correct predictions about the behavior of verbs in DAT-NOM constructions. For example, they cannot occur in the passive (as a consequence of one argument already having been promoted).
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(8) a finnast sumum börnum svona leikir skemmtilegir There seem.3PL some children.DAT such games.NOM fun ‘Some children think that such games are fun.’ Following Chomsky 2000, 2001, Anagnostopoulou assumes that the dative DP enters into an Agree relation with T (the dative DP checks person on T) and that the nominative DP checks number on T. The intervention effect can thus be explained if one assumes that the dative does not enter into an Agree relation with T in 7. Unfortunately, the data that Anagnostopoulou presents do not show the whole picture. All her examples have plural dative arguments as the associate of an expletive, but as Holmberg and Hróarsdóttir (2003:1000) show it matters whether the intervening dative is plural or singular. When the intervening dative is singular, the verb cannot show agreement with the embedded nominative (9b), whereas if the intervening dative is plural such agreement is fine (10b). (9) a. a There
fannst einhverjum found.SG some
essar ljósmyndir these photographs.NOM
manni man.DAT
ljótar ugly
‘A man found these photographs ugly.’ b. *a fundust einhverjum There found.PL some
manni man.DAT
essar ljósmyndir ljótar these photographs.NOM ugly (10) a. a fannst mörgum mönnum There found.SG many.DAT men.DAT essar these
ljósmyndir photographs.NOM
ljótar ugly
‘Many men found these photographs ugly.’
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b. a fundust mörgum mönnum there found.PL many.DAT men.DAT essar these
ljósmyndir photographs.NOM
ljótar ugly
‘Many men found these photographs ugly.’ From example 10b we cannot determine whether the verb shows agreement with the dative subject or the nominative object. However, we might conclude that the dative DP really can check number on T as well as person, and in fact there are some arguments that speak in favor of such an analysis. In my dialect, which is an obligatory agreement dialect (that is, verbs obligatorily show agreement with third person nominative objects), questions such as in 11, where the nominative element is plural and the dative subject may be interpreted as either singular or plural, have different interpretations depending on whether the verb shows default agreement or plural agreement. (11) a. Hverjum fannst ljósmyndirnar ljótar? who.DAT.SG found.SG photographs-the.NOM ugly ‘Who (which man) found these photographs ugly?’ b. Hverjum fundust ljósmyndirnar ljótar? who.DAT.PL found.PL photographs-the.NOM ugly ‘Who (or which men) found these photographs ugly?’ In 11a, where the verb shows default agreement (third person singular), the subject is interpreted as singular. In 11b, where the verb shows number agreement, the subject is interpreted as plural. As Anagnostopoulou discusses in detail, Icelandic ditransitive verbs fall into two classes. One class of verbs (gefa ‘give’, segja ‘tell’, sna ‘show’, etc.) allows symmetric passives (that is, both the IO and the DO may raise to the subject position), while the other class of verbs (skila ‘return’, svipta ‘deprive’, ræna ‘rob’, etc.) only allows asymmetric passives (that is, only the IO may raise to the subject position). Following Falk 1990, Holmberg 1991, Holmberg and Platzack 1995, and Collins and Thráinsson 1996, Anagnostopoulou assumes that the verbs in the former class have a double base: one where the goal is basegenerated above the theme (high in the VP, and thus a true double object
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construction), and another where the goal is base-generated below the theme (low in the VP, and thus corresponds to a PP-construction). As a result, with verbs like gefa ‘give’, both orders, IO > DO, and DO > IO are found. The latter word order is known as the INVERSION CONSTRUCTION. One of the characteristics of the inversion construction is that the IO must be focused or stressed, and therefore it cannot be object shifted. The examples in 12 are Anagnostopoulou’s 161, originally from Collins and Thráinsson 1996:415. In 12b, I have added the negation to show the ungrammaticality of object shift. (12) a. Hann gaf konunginum ambáttina ekki He.NOM gave king-the.DAT maidservant-the.ACC not ‘He did not give the king the maidservant.’ b. Hann gaf (ekki) ambáttina He.NOM gave (not) maidservant-the.ACC
(ekki) (not)
konunginum (*ekki) king-the.DAT (*not) *‘He did not give the maidservant the king.’ Accordingly, these verbs have symmetric passives. (13) a. Konunginum var gefin ambáttin king-the.DAT was given maidservant-the.NOM ‘The king was given the maidservant.’ b. Ambáttin var gefin konunginum Maidservant-the.NOM was given king-the.DAT *‘The maidservant was given the king.’ Verbs in the other class do not participate in the inversion construction, and therefore do not have the symmetric passive. Nevertheless, even though verbs in the former class all have the symmetric passive, not all of them seem to participate in the inversion construction. One of these verbs is lána ‘lend’. (Note that Anagnostopoulou, p. 199, example 171b, brings an example from Collins and Thráinsson 1996 that is parallel to 14c. My six informants and I do not share their grammaticality judgments.) The examples in 14 show that
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with lána ‘lend’, the IO must precede the DO even though the IO is stressed, as in 14c. (14) a. Hann lánai (ekki) bóndanum (ekki) He lent (not) farmer-the.DAT (not) grafolann stud-the.ACC
(ekki) (not)
‘He did not lend the farmer the stud.’ b. *Hann lánai (ekki) grafolann (ekki) bóndanum (ekki) He lent (not) stud-the.ACC (not) farmer-the.DAT (not) c. *Hann lánai (ekki) grafolann (ekki) bóndanum (ekki) He lent (not) stud-the.ACC (not) farmer-the.DAT (not) The examples in 15, however, show that the verb lána has a symmetric passive. In 15a, the dative goal, bóndanum ‘the farmer’, has raised to the subject position. In 15b the nominative theme, grafolinn ‘the stud’, has raised to the subject position. It is necessary to embed the passive sentences in a question to avoid V2 effects, such as the possibility of topicalization. Note also that if 15b were derived from the inversion construction, the prediction would be that the dative goal should be focused or stressed. This is not the case in either 13b or 15b. (15)
Hún vill vita … She wants know … ‘She would like to know …’
a. hvort bóndanum hafi ekki veri lánaur grafolinn whether farmer-the.DAT has not been lent stud-the.NOM ‘whether the farmer has not been lent the stud.’ b. hvort grafolinn hafi ekki veri lánaur bóndanum farmer-the.DAT whether stud-the.NOM has not been lent ‘whether the farmer has not been lent the stud.’ Apparently, in some respects the verb lána ‘lend’ behaves like verbs that do not allow the symmetric passive (because it does not occur in the inversion construction). However, in other respects it seems to behave
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like verbs that allow the symmetric passive (because both of its internal arguments may raise to the subject position). Since lána does not occur in the inversion construction, the derivation of 15b is problematic for Anagnostopoulou’s analysis. As she argues (chapter 3, section 8.2.1), vAPPL does not allow for an additional specifier in Icelandic (this also explains why Icelandic does not have non-parallel object shift as found in Norwegian and Swedish). If vAPPL allowed for an additional specifier, the nominative argument and the dative argument would be in the same minimal domain and the nominative argument could move to the outer specifier of v without violating locality conditions on Amovement. After having moved to the outer specifier of v, the nominative argument could move on to T. Since vAPPL does not allow for an additional specifier in Icelandic, the movement of the nominative argument across the dative argument in constructions such as 15b violates the MLC. Finally, let us turn to multiple specifiers and “tucking in”. I will not discuss the usual arguments against multiple specifiers; for example, that multiple specifiers pose a learnability problem as it can be difficult to figure out whether the structure is made of one projection with two specifiers or two projections with an empty head in the higher projection. Instead, I am concerned with the linear order of multiple specifiers. Anagnostopoulou assumes (following many others) that the negation and sentence medial adverbs mark the left edge of vP in Scandinavian. Object shift is then movement into an outer specifier, above the negation. If both objects in a double object construction are object shifted, the DO “tucks in” between the IO and the negation (the tree in 16 is Anagnostopoulou’s example 234, p. 155; I have added the negation). First, the IO moves to an outer specifier of v1P. Since the IO does not intervene anymore, the DO can object shift and “tuck in” below the IO.
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(16)
v1P
IO
v1P DO
v1P NEG
v1P Subj
v’ v-TR
v2P tIO
v’ vAPPL V
VP tDO
The negation occupies an extra specifier between the specifier into which the DO has been shifted and the specifier in which the subject is base-generated. Putting aside the argument that if the negation truly marks the left edge of vP, it should precede the objects, I do not understand the mechanism that regulates the linear order of the specifiers. In theory, it should be possible for the DO to “tuck in” below the negation, creating the word order IO–NEG–DO–SUBJ, a word order that does not exist in Scandinavian (unless the subject has been heavy NP shifted). It does, however, seem that the order is always fixed. Note, for instance, that negative shift in Swedish induces a freezing effect on double object shift (Ken Ramshøj Christensen, personal communication). If the IO is negative in Swedish, the only possible order is the one in 17a; that is, IO > DO. Non-parallel object shift in the presence of a negative object, as in 17b, is ungrammatical. (17) a. Jag gav honom intet ofta I gave him nothing often ‘I didn’t give him anything often.’ b. *Jag I
gav gave
intet nothing
honom him
ofta often
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The usual assumption (see Koch Christensen 1991; Christensen 2003a,b,c, and references there) is that the negative object in Scandinavian occupies the same position as the sentential negation, which evidently shows that object shift must target a position above negation, and not below it (otherwise examples such as 17b could be grammatical in Scandinavian). It therefore seems to me that some extra assumptions are needed to regulate the linear order of the specifiers. Alternatively, and perhaps also desirably, object shift should be accounted for by means other than multiple specifiers. In spite of the problems I have touched upon here, Anagnostopoulou’s study is an extremely important contribution to the understanding of the double object construction. In addition, the book is very interesting because it raises important questions about the theoretical make-up of the Minimalist Program. This book should not only be recommended to those who are interested in the syntax of ditransitives, but to all linguists; not least because it is a showcase of what solid and thorough argumentation should look like. I really enjoyed reading this book. REFERENCES Baker, Mark. C. 2001. The atoms of language: The mind’s hidden rules of grammar. New York: Basic Books. Boeckx, Cedric 2004. Review of The syntax of ditransitives: Evidence from clitics, by Elena Anagnostopoulou 2003. Journal of Linguistics 40.149–153. Bonet, Eulàlia 1991. Morphology after syntax: Pronominal clitics in Romance languages. Doctoral dissertation, MIT. Bonet, Eulàlia 1994. The person-case constraint: A morphological approach. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 22: The morphology-syntax connection, 33–52. Chomsky, Noam 1995. The minimalist program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chomsky, Noam 2000. Minimalist inquiries: The framework. Step by step, ed. by Roger Martin, David Michaels and Juan Uriagereka, 89–155. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chomsky, Noam 2001. Derivation by phase. Ken Hale: A life in language, ed. by Michael Kenstowicz, 1–52. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Christensen, Ken Ramshøj. 2003a. NEG-shift and repair strategies: Pied piping vs. preposition stranding. Unpublished ms., University of Aarhus. Christensen, Ken Ramshøj. 2003b. NEG-shift in the Scandinavian languages and English. Unpublished ms., University of Aarhus.
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Christensen, Ken Ramshøj. 2003c. On the synchronic and diachronic status of the negative adverbial ikke ‘not’. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 72. 1–53. Collins, Chris and Höskuldur Thráinsson. 1996. VP-internal structure and object shift in Icelandic. Linguistic Inquiry 27.391–444. D’Alessandro, Roberta, A. G. 2003. Impersonal si constructions: Agreement and interpretation. Doctoral dissertation, University of Stuttgart. Falk, Cecilia 1990. On double object constructions. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 46.53–100. Holmberg, Anders 1991. On the Scandinavian double object construction. Papers from the 12th Scandinavian conference of linguistics, 141–155. Reykjavík: Institute of Linguistics, University of Iceland. Holmberg, Anders and Christer Platzack. 1995. The role of inflection in Scandinavian syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holmberg, Anders and Thorbjörg Hróarsdóttir. 2003. Agreement and movement in Icelandic raising constructions. Lingua 113.997–1019. (Republished as Holmberg and Hróarsdóttir 2004.) Holmberg, Anders and Thorbjörg Hróarsdóttir. 2004. Agreement and movement in Icelandic raising constructions. Lingua 114.651–673. Hrafnbjargarson, Gunnar Hrafn 2004. Oblique subjects and stylistic fronting in the history of Scandinavian and English: The role of IP-Spec. Doctoral dissertation, University of Aarhus. Kayne, Richard 1975. French syntax: The transformational cycle. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Koch Christensen, Kirsti 1991. AGR, adjunction, and the structure of Scandinavian existential sentences. Lingua 84.137–158. Marantz, Alec 1993. Implications of asymmetries in double object constructions. Theoretical aspects of Bantu grammar, ed. by Sam A. Mchombo, 113–150. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. Perlmutter, David M. 1971. Deep and surface structure constraints in syntax. New York: Rinehart and Winston Inc. Sigursson, Halldór Ármann 1989. Verbal syntax and case in Icelandic. Doctoral dissertation, Lund University. Sigursson, Halldór Ármann 1996. Icelandic finite verb agreement. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 57.1–46.
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The Text Laboratory Department of Linguistics University of Oslo P.O.Box 1102 Blindern 0317 Oslo Norway [
[email protected]]
Morphological Change Up Close. Two and a Half Centuries of Verbal Inflection in Nuremberg. By David Fertig. (Linguistische Arbeiten, 422.) Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2000. Pp. ix, 179. Paper. 52. Reviewed by BRIAN D. JOSEPH, The Ohio State University There are (at least) two types of data-oriented linguists: those who go for data across lots of languages and those who go for lots of data within a single language. David Fertig is clearly a linguist of the second type, as he has put together a masterful and painstakingly detailed study of verbal inflection in the German dialect of Nuremberg in the period between 1356 and 1619, thus based on data which Fertig characterizes as “drawn from a single local variety of a single language” (p. 1). The data for this study come from a collection of texts Fertig assembled consisting of letters, journals, diaries, reports, treatises, bookkeeping records, and protocols, and for all of the items included, a fairly accurate dating was possible, as was the identification of the author. While Fertig gives a remarkably in-depth description of verbal inflection in his well-defined corpus, his goals are not (merely) descriptive in nature. In fact, as he states his aims, they are “to build a theoretical investigation of morphological change on a solid empirical foundation” (p. 1). Clearly, as the above account of the corpus indicates, the empirical foundation he works with is solid, and then some! Fertig is aware of the fact that one can sometimes drown, as it were, in too much data (see on this point Lass 1997, who, as Klein (1999:88–89) puts it, seems to believe that “despite our interest in taking into account as much data as possible in applying the comparative method, too much data can sometimes be a hindrance in that it may muddle the picture by making it
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harder to know what forms to take as input to the method.”). Yet, Fertig realizes, wisely I would say, that a rich database is perhaps the only way that the historical linguist can overcome the basic problem faced by those engaged in analyzing language history, stated by Labov (1972:100) as the need “to make the best of […] bad data—‘bad’ in the sense that it may be fragmentary, corrupted, or many times removed from the actual production of native speakers.” As a result, we are treated here to a study with an exhaustive basis—Fertig included in the database “every token of every verb that occurs in this collection of nearly one-half million words, about 86,000 tokens in all” (p. 1)—and with a foundation like this, it is fair to say that any theoretical conclusions Fertig reaches inspire confidence. After two brief introductory chapters about the overall goals and the nature of the corpus, Fertig lays out in chapter 3 his views about language change and especially morphological change. This chapter is well thought out, and contains some provocative and downright iconoclastic ideas. Rejecting the semiotic principle of “one-form-to-onemeaning” as a viable principle of morphology, Fertig argues for the SEPARATION HYPOTHESIS and suggests that “indirect, conditional, nonone-to-one mapping between function (or meaning) and form is [to be] regarded as normal and expected in morphology” (p. 16). He goes on to take issue with the importance that some (see, for example, Bybee 1985) have placed on diagrammatic iconicity (involving the extent to which fusion of a stem with an inflectional marker reflects the relative semantic relevance of each piece to the lexical item’s meaning, to dispute the rareness of exaptation (Lass 1990’s term for the reuse of linguistic “detruitus” by speakers in novel yet rational ways), to reassess the relationship of analogy and rules, and to emend the definition of paradigm leveling to “the paradigm-internally motivated elimination of an allomorphic stem alternation” (p. 32). This last point is especially important since, as he notes (p. 31), “a very high proportion of the changes in verbal inflection observable in the Nuremberg texts involve [sic] what is traditionally referred to as analogical or paradigm(atic) leveling.” He also recognizes the importance of blends and hypercorrection (which he sees as “a kind of analogical development”, p. 37) for the data in his corpus, but is doubtful about traditional typologies of analogical change.
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At this point in the book Fertig takes me to task for my lumping “all types of ‘change due to the influence of one form on another’ […] together under the heading ‘analogy’” (in Joseph 1998:362), saying that such “a practice […] has led to the frequent criticism of analogy as a ‘catchall’ term for processes that do not really have anything interesting in common” (p. 36). Let me offer, as a brief excursus, the following defense of my approach. My claim is that various changes, including such traditionally recognized phenomena as paradigm leveling, formclass (external) analogy, contamination (blending), re-compounding (renewal), reanalysis, and even folk etymology, do have much in common. For example, they are typically sporadic (as opposed to the regularity of sound change), typically show the involvement of some other form and a perceived relation to that other form (whereas sound change is impervious to such perceived relations), and typically are embedded in some grammatical subsystem of the language (whereas sound change is blind to grammatical involvement). We might add as well that these characteristics show these changes to have a psychological/cognitive grounding, whereas sound change can be seen as strictly phonetic and physiological in nature. This approach may indeed represent the defining of analogy “negatively as whatever is not sound change, semantic change, or borrowing,” a practice Fertig is clearly not impressed by, but so be it—to me, these characteristics represent valid properties of this otherwise disparate assortment of changes and show how they cohere as a group as opposed to other classes of changes with their own motivating factors (such as physiological ones, in the case of sound change, or social ones, as in the case of borrowing and diffusion more generally). To return to Fertig’s study, chapters 4 through 7 constitute the core of the presentation and analysis of the data. Chapter 4 offers first a detailed look at the inflectional endings, organized by person and number, with a special section on the 1st and 3rd plural forms of the present of sein ‘be’, whereas chapter 5 treats stem alternations. In this latter chapter, the organizing principle is essentially strong versus weak verbs, with a separate treatment of the modals, wissen ‘know’ and tun ‘do’, with discussion of stem-final consonant alternations as well (for instance, Verner’s Law alternations). The theoretical point to be drawn from chapter 5 has to do with directionality in leveling, and Fertig finds that the notions of “local markedness and relative token frequency”
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(espoused, among others, by Tiersma 1982 and Bybee 1994) do “not appear to be applicable to the cases of leveling in verbal morphology” seen in the Nuremberg corpus (p. 107). Chapter 6 examines shifts that some verbs show between inflectional classes, a phenomenon that provides an interesting test—and to some extent confirmation—of the theory of inflectional class stability advocated by Wurzel (1984) wherein the importance of the stem vowel in determining inflectional class membership was stressed. Chapter 7 focuses on the ge- participial prefix, clarifying, among other things, some aspects of the absence of this prefix where it might otherwise be expected. In his concluding chapter, Fertig makes an important nod in the direction of sociolinguistics and variation and how change is to be understood in this context. Given the acuity of his remarks throughout the book, and the general reasonableness of what he says in this chapter, with its reference to usage differences seen in “the opposition between the chancery and administrators, on the one hand, and the women, on the other” (p. 144), one can only regret that this chapter is so short, a mere four and a half pages! Healthy iconoclasm is found here too, as Fertig concludes, following Labov 1989, that while there is a relation between variation and change, “the earlier view equating variation with change in progress is now obsolete” (p. 147). This work is clearly written and very cleanly produced, with only a few typographical errors at most. There is no index—a minor failing— but Fertig does include an extensive (17-page!) bibliography, and three appendices, one a ten-page verb frequency list giving the frequency of occurrence for every verb in the corpus (not surprisingly, sein ‘be’ and haben ‘have’ are the two most common, followed by werden ‘become’ wollen ‘want’, sollen ‘ought to’, lassen ‘let’, kommen ‘come’, tun ‘do’, and schreiben ‘write’, to round out the top ten), one a two-page sampling of lines from his data tables, and the last a two-page listing of sources for the texts in his collection. All in all, this is a most satisfying contribution to our understanding both of the development of German verbal inflection and of the nature of morphological change. Despite the appeal of broad cross-linguistic surveys, real progress in our field is made, I would say, with fine-grained exhaustive studies of the sort that this excellent and provocative work represents.
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REFERENCES Bybee, Joan. 1985. Morphology. A study of the relation between meaning and form. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bybee, Joan. 1994. Morphological universals and change. The encyclopedia of language and linguistics, vol. 5, ed. by R. E. Asher and J. M. Y. Simpson, 2557–2562. New York: Pergamon. Joseph, Brian D. 1998. Diachronic morphology. The handbook of morphology, ed. by Andrew Spencer and Arnold M. Zwicky, 351–373. Oxford: Blackwell. Klein, Jared S. 1999. Theory vs. practice in diachronic linguistics. Review of Historical linguistics and language change, by Roger Lass 1997. Language Sciences 21.87–104. Labov, William. 1972. Some principles of linguistic methodology. Language in Society 1.97–120. Labov, William. 1989. The child as linguistic historian. Language Variation and Change 1.85–97. Lass, Roger. 1990. How to do things with junk: Exaptation in language evolution. Journal of Linguistics 26.79–102. Lass, Roger. 1997. Historical linguistics and language change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tiersma, Peter. 1982. Local and general markedness. Language 58.832–849. Wurzel, Wolfgang Ullrich. 1984. Flexionsmorphologie und Natürlichkeit. Berlin: Akademie.
Department of Linguistics 222 Oxley Hall The Ohio State University Columbus, OH 43210-1298 USA [
[email protected]]
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Clausal Syntax of German. By Judith Berman. Stanford: CSLI Publications, 2003. Pp. iii, 187. Paper. $25.00. Reviewed by ANNIE ZAENEN, Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) This monograph discusses some of the major problems in German syntax from the Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) perspective codified in Bresnan 2001. Although there are some LFG papers that discuss phenomena in German syntax and there is an older introduction by Berman and Frank (1996), there was until now no book-length work in the LFG framework that focuses uniquely on the syntax of German. This work, although still a rather slender volume, changes this state of affairs. After an introduction to LFG based on Bresnan 2001 the book provides a treatment of some often, and some less, discussed phenomena and spells out their relevance to LFG theory. Chapter 3 (the first substantial one) translates the topological model of German sentence structure into a phrase structure model with functional projections, and centers on the problem of whether German has an IP along with a CP. Following mainly arguments given by Haider (1991, 1997), Berman adopts a non-IP analysis. She also follows Haider in proposing a flat structure for the clause final verbal complex. In the course of this chapter, Berman assumes, without much discussion, that German follows the endocentric mapping principles of Bresnan 2001 for the projections of C. This means that she assumes that these German c-to-f-structure mappings are configurational. For the projections of V, she also proposes several levels of VP embedding, but does not clearly say which role they play, because she proposes that the grammatical functions in the middle field are identified through lexicocentric function specification (case marking). Various levels of VPs in the middle field are often proposed in GB to account for the different partial VP-fronting possibilities, but LFG does not need this device. Chapter 4 argues that although German has no subject position it requires a subject function in every sentence. Given the obvious absence of overt subjects in several types of German sentences, that point of view needs to be supported. Berman adapts to LFG a proposal made in GB, namely that the 3rd person marking on the tensed verb in ostensibly subjectless sentences constitutes the subject. In zu-infinitives with anaphoric control, the subject function with a “PRO” value is introduced
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by a functional equation on the zu and in clauses with functional control via the functional control itself. As the discussion shows, the LFG machinery makes it very easy to introduce categories in the functional structure that do not have a corresponding c-structure. This makes clear arguments for such categories desirable. Berman shows that her proposals can be made work. However, she does not show that they solve any problems, such as the occurrence of nominative phrases in infinitives (for example, einer nach dem anderen ‘one after the other’), in a more elegant or economic way than other alternatives. Still, following GB tradition, she tries to link her treatment of verbal inflection as introducing a subject to a typology of languages with and without overt subjects. She contrasts Scandinavian languages without verb agreement with German to account for the obligatoriness of overt subjects in the former. However, she also classifies Dutch as a language with obligatory overt subjects; but it is well known that this is the wrong generalization for the majority dialect, where the expletive is optional. Moreover, it creates a problem for her account, as the morphology of Dutch is rich enough to allow the subject to be absent in the c-structure. Of course, the optionality of the Dutch expletive also creates a problem for the proposal advocated. Chapters 5 is likely the most interesting for readers focusing on LFG theory rather than on German syntax because it discusses the introduction of empty c-structure categories (traces), a relative novelty in the theory. Berman follows Bresnan 2001 in proposing a limited set of empty c-structure categories in LFG on the basis of a study of weak crossover phenomena. The arguments follow Bresnan 2001 rather closely for long distance crossover (Bresnan’s account in turn is based in part on an earlier paper by Berman). The account relies on empty cstructure categories to handle contrasts such as that between 1 and 2. (1)
Who said that he consoled his mother?
(2)
a. *Wen sagte seine Mutter habe who said his mother have
sie she
getröstet? consoled
b. *Who did his mother say that she consoled? The argument is based on the assumption that one needs to refer to linear order to state the exact conditions on the grammaticality of such
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crossover configurations. Bresnan (2001) motivates the need for empty categories in long distance dependencies by the mapping principles from c-to-f-structure, which state that in languages such as English, GF are mapped from configurationally identified c-structures. Berman assumes the same account for German. Berman accounts for the difference in grammaticality between German and English sentences, such as those found in 3, by assuming a different status for German local subjects and local topicalization: they are in the domain of lexicocentric function specification (identification through case marking). (3) a. … dass that
seine Mutter jeder mag. his mother everyone likes
b. Seine Mutter mag jeder. his mother likes everyone. c. *His mother everyone likes. The proposal then assumes that there needs to be a trace in the German middle field to account for long distance crossover, but given the lack of crossover effects within the middle field it can be anywhere. The contrast between English and German with respect to object crossover is covered by some not very well-worked out but not implausible assumptions about constraints on argument structure. Berman discusses the counterproposal of Dalrymple et al. 2001 that does not require traces, but rejects it because it does not rely on the endrocentric mapping principles and the morphological function specification proposed in Bresnan 2001. It seems rather frivolous to accept a major revision of the theory and the whole philosophy of LFG without discussing in detail exactly what damage the Dalrymple et al. 2001 proposal does to the architecture of the c-structure to f-structure mappings. As far as I know, the long distance crossover facts are the only argument for traces in German (and any other language). One cannot reject a counter analysis by simply saying that it would contradict assumptions that are made only to make one’s own analysis possible. The assumption that German is an endocentric (configurational) language in the relevant aspects, and the c-to-f-structure mapping principles defined in Bresnan 2001 make it impossible to account for
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long distance dependencies without traces, and this is the path that Berman follows without further discussion in chapter 6. In light of these assumptions, she discusses both a functional uncertainty and a cyclic approach with iterating local dependencies without adducing data that would clearly favor one over another. In chapter 7, “Distribution of Sentential Subjects”, Berman defends two claims: that all embedded tensed clauses in German are at the periphery (left-dislocated or extraposed), and that clauses have the same grammatical functions as nominal arguments, so that one can dispense with the COMP function. I find this chapter rather badly organized and do not understand very well what these two claims have to do with each other. What follows is my best attempt to make sense of it. The claim that sentential arguments have the same grammatical functions as nominal ones is based on a reconsideration of arguments presented in Dalrymple and Lødrop 2000, who propose a mixed analysis where some clauses are COMPs and others are OBJs. Berman argues that some of their arguments rest on the wrong examples, and that when the right examples are chosen it can be argued that that-clauses in German can be OBJs or OBLs, and that none need to be assumed to be COMPs. An argument in favor of COMP-clauses given in Dalrymple and Lødrup 2000 is based on the contrast between 4 and 5. (4) Dass die Erde rund ist, (das) hat that the earth round is that has ‘That the earth is round surprised him.’ (5)
ihn gewundert. him surprised
Dass die Erde rund ist, *(darüber) hat sie sich gewundert. that the earth round is *it-about has she herself surprised. ‘That the earth is round, she was surprised about that’
The assumption here is that OBJs can be topicalized, whereas COMPs cannot. Berman proposes to reanalyze apparent sentential topicalization as left-dislocation with deletion of the resumptive pronoun, which is seen as a case of topic drop. As Berman observes, this analysis is an LFG adaptation of an analysis proposed for Dutch by Koster (1978) and for German by Oppenrieder (1991). As topic drop is only possible with subjects and (accusative) objects, it accounts for the contrasts above.
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Note, however, that this treatment of “topicalized” that-clauses does not require the assumed function assignment: left-dislocated elements are not assumed to have the same function as the element that they are anaphorically connected to. In fact they are generally assumed to have only a discourse function and no subcategorized one.1 This, of course, is no argument against the proposed analysis, only against the way the argument is structured. Things become more puzzling if one looks at the second position where that-clauses can occur: extraposed in the Nachfeld. This is a position where nominal elements cannot occur. As sentences are not morphologically marked, we need to develop new positions to identify them. Berman proposes to right adjoin them to the VP. However, again this is not a position for other subcategorized arguments, so it does not jibe with the proposal that that-clauses have the same function as nominal arguments. Here I would rather argue that this is an argument against this proposal, as maintaining it weakens the mapping theory. What then are the arguments in favor of OBJ and OBL function? They are the ones developed in Dalrymple and Lødrop 2000: alternation with a nominal object, passivization, and coordination. However, passive sentences can be analyzed as involving topicalization/left-dislocation as above. Alternations have to be allowed in general, so the main argument is coordination. Here Berman makes the interesting observation that the (a) versions of the following sentences are grammatical, whereas the (b) versions are not. (6) a. Ich informierte ihn über die Situation I informed him about the situation und dass and that
Hans krank Hans sick
ist. is
‘I informed him about the situation and that Hans is sick.’
1
The structure that Berman proposes for “topicalized” that-clauses might be closer to that of contrastive dislocation construction as described in Thráinsson 1979, Zaenen 1997 and Grohmann 2000 for German, but that type of construction is not discussed anywhere.
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b. *Ich informierte ihn, dass Hans krank ist I informed him that Hans sick is und über and over
die Situation. the situation
(7) a. Er vergass die Verabredung und dass es wichtig war, he forgot the appointment and that it important was pünklich on-time
zu sein. to be
‘He forgot the appointment and that it was important to be on time.’ b. *Er he
vergass dass es wichtig war, pünklich zu sein forgot that it important was on-time to be
und die Verabredung. and the appointment However, she does not propose an analysis of this contrast. She suggests that the sentence final versions can be assumed to be extraposed, but if that is the case this would be the first clear violation of the coordinated constituent constraint, and if we are to assume null pronouns in the second constituent of the grammatical clauses it would be nice to have some arguments for them. To summarize: left-dislocated clauses do not need an OBJ or OBL function, extraposed ones do not pattern with nominal OBJs or OBLs, and so are no argument for a similarity in function. The contrasts in 6 and 7 might form the basis for an argument if identity of function is required for coordination, but they remain unexplained under the analysis given. The last substantial chapter discusses the occurrence of es with finite clauses. It is too complex to summarize, as it relies on six interacting assumptions, only one of which is specific to this discussion. It is a rather satisfying demonstration of the power of the framework developed in the previous chapters. The book ends with a summary and a list of some open problems.
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Overall, Clausal Syntax of German is a more than competent analysis of some major problems in German syntax in the LFG framework. From the discussion above, it is most likely clear that its main quality is not originality, which is not surprising given that this is a reworked doctoral dissertation. The lack of originality is potentially positive because specialists in German syntax could read the book to familiarize themselves with LFG, as it allows one to see clearly what is common to previous analyses and what is specific to LFG. Most of the discussion is clear and coherent, adapted ideas are correctly attributed to their original authors, and problems are clearly flagged. Together with Bresnan 2001, this work constitutes an excellent source for anyone who wants to teach an introduction to LFG with German data. REFERENCES Berman, Judith and Anette Frank. 1996. Deutsche and Französische Syntax im Formalismus der LFG. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Bresnan, Joan. 2001. Lexical-functional syntax. Oxford: Blackwell. Dalrymple, Mary and Helge Lødrup. 2000. The grammatical functions of complement clauses. Proceedings of the LFG ’00 conference, ed. by Miriam Butt and Tracy H. King, 82–103. http://www-csli.stanford.edu/publications/ LFG/5/lfg00.html. Dalrymple, Mary, Ron Kaplan, and Tracy H. King. 2001. Weak crossover and the absence of traces. Proceedings of the LFG ’01 conference. ed. by Miriam Butt and Tracy H. King, 66–82. http://www-csli.stanford.edu/publications/ LFG/6/lfg01.html. Grohmann, Kleanthes. 2000. Copy left dislocation. Proceedings of the 19th West Coast conference on formal linguistics, ed. by Roger Billerey and Danielle Lillehaugen. 139–152. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. Haider, Hubert. 1991 Fakultativ kohärente Infinitkonstruktionen im Deutschen. Technical Report 17, Universität Stuttgart. Haider, Hubert. 1997. Projective economy: On the minimal functional structure of the German clause. German: Syntactic problems – problematic syntax, ed. by Werner Abraham and Elly van Gelderen. 83–103, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Koster, Jan. 1978. Why subject sentences don’t exist. Recent transformational studies in European languages, ed. by Samuel J. Keyser. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Oppenrieder, Wilhelm. 1991. Von Subjekten, Sätzen und Subjektsätzen. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.
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Thráinsson, Höskuldur. 1979. On complementation in Icelandic. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Cambridge/New York: Garland Publishers. Zaenen, Annie. 1997. Contrastive dislocation in Dutch and Icelandic. Materials on left dislocation, ed. by Elena Anagnostopoulou, Henk van Riemsdijk, and Frans Zwarts. 119–148, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Annie Zaenen Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) 3333, Coyote Hill Road Palo Alto, CA 94304 USA [
[email protected]]
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Murray’s Musings1 Although this number of the JGL marks my official debut as Chair of the JGL Editorial Committee, Ilana Mezhevich (Editorial and Production Assistant) and I were also responsible for JGL 16.4. Our goal was to take over the Journal by stealth, for clearly the best editorial transition is one that is seamless and invisible. Although this might seem a modest goal, maintaining the high standards of editorial excellence established by Mark Louden and his predecessor, Paul Roberge, proved a much greater challenge than I could possibly have imagined. I have learned quickly that one of the most pleasurable aspects of my new job is being a member of a hardworking team. In this regard, I would first like to express my gratitude to the members of the Editorial Committee and the Advisory Board, whose hard work makes this journal possible. I would especially like to thank Sarah Fagan, who has been Review Editor since the JGL’s inaugural issue four years ago (JGL 13.1). In fact, Sarah has provided almost a decade of service as Review Editor, since she also served the American Journal of Germanic Linguistics and Literatures in this capacity for five years beginning in 1995. In addition, an enormous bouquet of gratitude goes to outgoing Editor, Mark Louden. His leadership over the past years has been instrumental in the JGL’s ongoing transformation into the high quality journal it has become, and I am very grateful that Mark has agreed to remain on the Editorial Board as Consulting Editor. I freely attest to the fact that this position is not simply an honorary one. I have already lost track of the number of emails I have sent to Mark requesting his advice on an endless range of issues. Finally, though, we should remember that the JGL is just entering its fifth year, and its genesis was possible only through the dedicated efforts of a number of individuals. In this regard, we must above all extend our gratitude to outgoing Consulting Editor, Paul Roberge. As Mark Louden observed in the JGL’s inaugural number (vol. 13.1, p. 1), “any future 1
In introducing this irregular series of Murray’s Musings, I am shamelessly borrowing a tradition from Diachronica with its Koerner’s Korner during Konrad Koerner’s tenure as editor, and later Joseph’s/Joe’s Jottings (reflecting the transition in editorship from Brian Joseph to Joseph Salmons). Alas, a transition from Mark’s to Murray’s Musing is not possible, hindsight is 20/20!
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success of the JGL will be built on the base created under [Paul Roberge’s] leadership.” A positive aspect of many transitions is the new faces that appear on the scene. In this regard, I am very pleased to welcome Richard Page (Pennsylvania State University) as Review Editor and Ilana Mezhevich, a doctoral student at the University of Calgary, as Editorial and Production Assistant. Both have already demonstrated a dedication beyond the call of duty, and I am particularly grateful to Ilana for applying her impressive editorial skills with such enthusiasm. I would also like to announce that the JGL now has a dedicated email address:
[email protected]. Of course, the members of the Editorial Committee can still be reached by means of their individual email addresses. In addition, David Fertig (SUNY, Buffalo), who is kindly maintaining the Web site for the Society for Germanic Linguistics, has posted the JGL’s revised Submission Guidelines at: http://german.lss.wisc.edu/~sgl/journal.html#art). Finally, I would like to acknowledge the support provided to the JGL by the University of Calgary. I am particularly grateful to two individuals: Stephen Randall, Dean of Social Sciences, for contributing to the funding of the Editorial and Production Assistant, and Nicholas ekulin, Director of the Language Research Center, for providing office and computer support for the production of the Journal.
