Reviewed by Roberta D’Alessandro, Leiden University

This book is a collection of articles on some of the key properties of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) syntax within the minimalist framework. The book is comprised of two parts: Part 1, ‘Movement and empty category issues’, and Part 2, ‘Issues on the syntax-morphology interface’.

After a brief introduction by the editor, the book opens with Marcelo Ferreira’s chapter, ‘Null subjects and finite control in Brazilian Portuguese’. Ferreira examines the behavior of referential null subjects in BP, concluding that they behave like obligatory controlled PRO. He arrives at the conclusion that referential null subjects are to be considered as traces left by the (hyper)raising of the phrases originally merged in subject position. Null possessor constructions are the topic of the third chapter. In it, Simone Floripi and Jairo Nunes examine the dele construction, observing how dele behaves as an anaphor in some contexts but as a pronoun in others. This is due, according to the authors, to the fact that dele is an obligatorily controlled trace of movement to theta positions. When this movement is impeded (because of an island separating dele from its antecedent), dele behaves as a pronoun. Pronominalization is, however, a less economic alternative than movement.

In her chapter ‘Patterns of extraction out of factive islands in Brazilian Portuguese’, Marina R. A. Augusto shows that extraction can happen out of arguments and even adjuncts, depending on the nature of the complement and the presence or absence of a Top projection. In the following chapter, ‘Uniform raising analysis for standard and nonstandard relative clauses in Brazilian Portuguese’, Mary A. Kato and Jairo Nunes argue in favor of Richard Kayne’s derivational approach to relative clauses. The final chapter of this part of the book, by Jairo Nunes and Raquel S. Santos, proposes new diagnostics for the identification of empty categories based on stress shift.

Part 2 opens with a chapter on possessive-existential constructions with ter in BP, by Juanito Avelar, who postulates a reanalysis (albeit non-morphological) of this form as a fusion of estar and com. In the following chapter, Ana C. Bastos-Gee discusses vP/verb fronting, showing how it amounts to topicalization. She identifies three different types of topicalization: (i) topicalization of the infinitival verb only, (ii) topicalization of the infinitival verb with its specific internal argument, and (iii) topicalization of the infinitival with a generic internal argument. In Ch. 9, Jairo Nunes and Cristina Ximenes discuss apparent PP coordination, arguing that the insertion/copy of the second preposition is morphological, and is triggered by a parallelism requirement on coordinated structures. In the final chapter, Jairo Nunes and Cynthia Zocca investigate ellipsis resolution in the case of non-morphological identity between the antecedent and the elided phrase.

The first part of the book is more uniform in its subject matter, while the second touches on several different issues. Overall, the book is a must-have for anyone working on BP syntax.