Reviewed by Dimitrios Ntelitheos, United Arab Emirates University
This book is a collection of articles providing a broad picture of the consequences of the cartographic approach to the general theory of syntax. After a brief introduction by the editors, the first section starts with a study of the German interrogative marker den by Josef Bayer. Paola Bennincà discusses wh-pronouns in headless relative clauses in Italo-Romance and early English varieties, while Alessandra Giorgi proposes a novel theory of indexicality. Günther Grewendorf presents an analysis of wh-movement as topic movement.
In the following chapter, Jacqueline Guèron and Liliane Haegeman discuss the distribution and interpretation of the neuter pronoun tet in West Flemish. Elizabeth Pearce studies the presence of a number projection within the DP in three Southern Oceanic languages, and Gemma Rigau describes the properties of the Catalan particle pla. Giampaolo Salvi studies the nature of the V2 system in Medieval Romance, and Maria Luisa Zubizarreta closes the first section with a discussion of the domain between T and negation in Romance.
The second section begins with an application of the smuggling approach to the movement of verbal strings in the low clausal functional field, by Adriana Belleti, and Luigi Rizzi. Ignacio Bosque and M. Carme Picallo argue that the clitic-like element preceding a numeral in partitive constructions in Old Catalan is not a determiner but a pronoun, followed by Richard S. Kayne and Jean-Yves Pollock’s exploration of hyper-complex inversion in French. Hilda Koopman treats Samoan ergatives as derived through a double-passivization process, while Jaklin Kornfilt discusses suspended affixation in nominal and verbal coordination in Turkish. Christer Platzack argues that the lack of backward binding in V2 languages is due to the lack of a SubjP projection because of the V2 condition.
Andrew Radford and Michèle Vincent discuss the feature composition of participal light verbs in French, containing the auxiliary avoir, while Henk van Riemsdijk proposes an inherent incompatibility of uninflected pronominal forms with the dative case in German. Alain Rouveret explains three idiosyncratic properties of the Portuguese verbal syntax. Ur Shlonsky explores wh-in-situ in French, while Dominique Sportiche discusses the properties of the adverbial particle re in the same language. Tarald Taraldsen closes the second section, proposing that a structural object position is available in the nominal.
In the final section, Werner Abraham discusses double definiteness in Old and Modern Scandinavian, followed by Peter Cole and Gabriella Hermon’s investigation of the order of verbal affixes and functional structure in Imbabura Quechua. Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin treats number as a feature, followed by Joseph Emonds’s article in which he argues for QP as the highest functional projection above NP. M. Rita Manzini and Leonard M. Savoia explore clitic and adverbial negations in Romance. Ian Roberts supports a cartographic approach to grammaticalization, while Halldór Ármann Sigurđsson and Joan Maling look at the nature of silent and overt marking of certain categories. The book ends with a discussion of postnominal adjectives in Greek indefinite noun phrases by Melita Stavrou.
This book is essential reading to anyone interested in cartographic approach within linguistic theory. Its numerous articles open new possibilities in current cutting-edge research of the morphosyntactic component of grammar.