Reviewed by Roberta D’Alessandro, Leiden University

Structures and strategies is a collection of articles written by Adriana Belletti during her long career as a linguist. The most important contributions by B to syntactic theory are presented in this book, which offers a summa of her scientific work.

The volume is divided into two parts. Part 1 is dedicated to ‘Clause structure and verb related syntax’; and Part 2 to ‘The syntax of (some) discourse related strategies’.

After a brief introduction, Part 1 opens with Ch. 1 ‘Generalized verb movement’, a reprint of an article that first appeared in 1990 in the book of the same name which set the agenda of syntactic research on agreement by proposing the existence of two functional projections exclusively dedicated to verb-argument agreement. Ch. 2 addresses the issue of ‘Agreement and case in past participial clauses in Italian’, expanding the idea of morphological inflection through head incorporation in syntax. Ch. 3 offers a fine-grained analysis of verb movement in Italian and a detailed cartography of the structural positions targeted by head movement. Ch. 4 features a comparative analysis of past participial agreement in French and Italian. Ch. 5 examines clitic doubling and the internal structure of clitics. Starting from the assumption that clitics move from their base position, B argues that this movement is ascribable to Case checking requirements. The landing position of clitics depends instead on verbal inflectional morphology checking requirements. Enclisis and proclisis configurations find here a principled explanation.

Part 2 is devoted to discourse structure and collects B’s contribution to information structure theory. Ch. 6 reproduces B’s seminal insights regarding the existence of a so-called ‘low periphery’ of the VP, mirroring that proposed for the CP field. Subject inversion structures are investigated, and the proposal is put forward that the subject in these constructions occupies a (new information) focus position. Movement of the subject to this focus position in inversion structures is again conditioned by Case checking requirements. Next, VSO and VOS structures are examined. The general conclusion is drawn that the low IP area is much richer than previously assumed. This idea is further developed in Chs. 7 and 8.

Ch. 9 departs radically from the rest of Part 2 by discussing how linguistic evidence from language acquisition (of null subjects, of complementizer in subject extraction, and of clitic placement) can contribute to the development of a more explanatorily adequate syntactic theory. Next, B examines answering strategies and the nature of clefts. Finally, Ch. 11 builds on the same idea of parallel ‘edges’ (or peripheries, for the CP and the VP) to examine clitic left dislocations and hanging topics.

This book is a valuable resource for scholars working on agreement and sentence structure. It reproduces some book parts and articles that had been quite difficult to find, yet have constituted cornerstones of syntactic theory in the last twenty years.