Reviewed by Kleanthes K. Grohmann, University of Cyprus

In this volume, John te Velde pursues a theory of coordination within the minimalist program that incorporates recent theoretical advances and tools. Based primarily on data from English, German, and Dutch, the author offers interesting and novel accounts of symmetries and asymmetries that can be observed in coordination phenomena, including case assignment, number agreement, ellipsis, and the role and nature of the parallelism requirement in general. This approach is strictly derivational in nature (integrated within the so-called phase theory of minimalism), and the author develops computational processes that incorporate the minimalist building blocks mentioned in the book’s subtitle.

Ch. 1 provides a detailed ‘Outline of the study’ (1–12). ‘Features and matching in coordination’ (13–88) makes up Ch. 2, which presents an overview of the author’s account and the empirical issues involved. The major claims addressed in this study are that (i) the operations Select (from the lexicon) and Merge (into phrase structure) are involved in building coordinate structures and (ii) the operation Copy (of morpho-syntactic or semantic features) is responsible for observed symmetries, whereas failure of the application of the operation Copy (at specific points in the derivation) results in particular asymmetries.

In Ch. 3, ‘Deriving coordinate structures’ (89–178), the author addresses and accounts for symmetries and asymmetries in coordination. He extends this approach to coordinate ellipsis in Ch. 4, ‘Deriving coordinate ellipsis’ (179–282). Utilizing the notion of multiple spell-out (as applied to phases), which first applies to conjuncts in coordinated ellipsis structures followed by subsequent conjuncts linear-successively, the author argues persuasively that conjuncts form a phase (in the relevant technical sense) and thus serve as the relevant unit for the application of spell-out. The short conclusion, Ch. 5 ‘Coordinate ellipsis and the structure of West Germanic’ (283–316), addresses a more finely articulated left periphery for German that contains (at least) two projections, one headed by the complementizer (C) and the other by a separate topic (head Top). Combining several different strands of recent research, the author assumes that German has an underlying object-verb order and that the subject remains within the inflection phrase (IP; the canonical subject position, i.e. the specifier of the tense phrase [SpecTP]).

The book also contains more than forty pages of endnotes in addition to the references, an appendix, a name index, and a subject index. Although the book has a nice visual presentation, the author’s writing style is certainly dense. The lack of both roadmaps for the structure of the book and any background on minimalist theorizing will probably make the volume difficult to penetrate for most people not dedicated to (and knowledgeable in) either coordination or minimalism.