Reviewed by David Stifter, Universität Wien, Austria
In this syntactic study of Finnish, Satu Helena Manninen explores a language that has rarely received attention in the generative tradition. In the introduction, M describes the purpose of her study: to investigate the syntactic function and behavior of manner adverbials—specifically, their forms, licensing, hierarchical and linear positions, and relation to other verb phrase adverbials. (Adverbials in subordinate clauses are not included in this investigation.)
Finnish is an agglutinative language with a great quantity of inflectional and derivational morphology. As a consequence, adverbials—unlike adverbs—are realized as nouns, adjectives, numerals, nonfinite verbs, and prepositional and postpositional phrases. M aims to present a uniform analysis of adverbials of these different types.
In Ch. 2, ‘The minimalist framework and the structure of Finnish sentences’, M explains the theoretical foundations of her study and provides an account of the functional structures of Finnish sentences. In Ch. 3, ‘Adverbials and functional categories’, she contrasts previous treatments of adverbials, including Richard Kayne’s antisymmetry theory (The antisymmetry of syntax. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994) and minimalism as well as the feature based theories of Guglielmo Cinque (Adverbs and functional heads: A cross-linguistic perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), Artemis Alexiadou (Adverb placement: A case study in antisymmetric syntax. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1997), and Christopher Laenzlinger (Comparative studies in word order variation: Adverbs, pronouns, and clause structure in Romance and Germanic. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1998).
In Ch. 4, ‘The structure of Finnish manner adverbials’, M demonstrates that Finnish adverbials, derived from nouns and adjectives, always inflect for lexical case. From distributional observations she concludes that even true adverbs (i.e. adverbs with exclusively adverbial affixes) are case-inflected, and thus, all adverbial subcategories can be uniformly analyzed as ‘kasus phrases’ (kPs) or as prepositional or postpositional phrases (PPs).
Ch. 5, ‘A theory of layered VPs’, deals with the structure of Finnish sentences. M assumes that verb phrases (VPs) have a layered structure, which consists of a lexical verb with only a very basic meaning and several little vPs that each add a semantic dimension such as agentivity and causativity. Ch. 6 is concerned with ‘The position of Finnish manner adverbials’. M assumes that both obligatory and optional manner adverbials, uniformly treated by the computational system of language, should be seen as arguments of the verb. Whereas the order of themes and manner adverbials in Finnish is fixed, the order of sentence-final adverbials (e.g. manner, place, time) is not. M hypothesizes that sometimes an unambiguous hierarchical structure does not need an unambiguous linear ordering. She argues that her analyses, primarily supported by Finnish data, will hold for other languages as well.
Although intended for a general audience of those interested in Finnish linguistics, the technical language limits the readership primarily to scholars with a good understanding of generative linguistics. The arguments are clearly arranged, and regular summaries at the beginnings and the ends of the chapters and sections promote clarity.