Reviewed by Florian Haas, Freie Universität Berlin

The locative alternation, commonly exemplified with sentences like Jack sprayed paint on the wall as opposed to Jack sprayed the wall with paint, has been widely discussed for at least two decades. In the present book, Seizi Iwatare visits the locative alternation from the perspective of (usage-based) construction grammar and complements it with a detailed discussion of the corresponding Japanese structures. His main thesis is that alternation variants should be analyzed as verb-(class) specific constructions. In this way he contradicts the lexicalist analysis advocated by Steven Pinker (Learnability and cognition: The acquisition of argument structure, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989) and others, as well as Adele Goldberg’s more classical constructional analysis in Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), in which stable verb meanings combine with relatively abstract constructions.

The book has twelve chapters. Chs. 1 and 2 introduce the topic and give an overview of the aforementioned alternative analyses. Chs. 3 to 7 present his ‘lexical-constructional account’ of the locative alternation, making reference to other studies and criticizing them in several respects. For instance, he considers whether the location-as-object variant (Jack sprayed the wall with paint) necessarily involves a holistic effect (the entire wall is covered with paint). Another issue that comes up repeatedly is that of allegedly non-alternating verbs, i.e. verbs that seem to occur only in one of the two variants, and explanations for their behavior. For a number of such verbs, I presents corpus and Internet data in which the putatively non-existent variants appear.

Ch. 8 (‘Further issues’) relates the analysis to usage-based theories of language acquisition and deals with the degree of granularity constructions should have from a more general point of view. Ch. 9 (‘The locative alternation with verbs of removal’) and Ch. 10 (‘Morphologically complex cases’) return to the discussion of more specific types of alternating verbs, including a section on the morphologically marked German counterpart of the English alternation. Ch. 11 is an extensive discussion of the locative alternation in Japanese. In Ch. 12 the main theses are summarized.

The book provides a good overview of a complex topic and puts forward a constructional analysis that is intuitively plausible. It is arguable, however, whether the application of verb-(class) specific constructions introduced in William Croft’s Radical construction grammar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) to the locative alternation really constitutes a new constructional theory, as I repeatedly claims. Moreover, the author fervently expounds his commitment to the usage-based approach but does not strictly follow its methodological tenets; in many cases he resorts to made-up examples from the literature, including doubtful grammaticality judgments, particularly in the case of the German data in Ch. 10. Apart from this, his somewhat repetitive criticism of alternative models seems inappropriately harsh. The readability of the book, moreover, would profit from a more careful editing of example sentences and a more transparent structuring.