Reviewed by Thomas R. Wier, University of Chicago

When pressed, most linguists will agree that the traditional arguments about grammatical categories have a long and confused history that explains lexical idiosyncrasies as exceptions to generalizations that do not take part in productive morphosyntactic processes. Etsuyo Yuasa’s book on modular mismatches in natural language is in part an answer to this problem. By adopting a multimodular approach along the lines of autolexical syntax (Sadock 1991) or that of Culicover and Jackendoff (2005), such cases of categorial mismatch are seen as the lifeblood of modular autonomy, as they constitute the actual direct evidence that distinguishes one grammatical module from another. Incorporating constructional approaches and multimodularism, Y’s work represents a unique and important contribution to the effect of lexical variation on syntactic and semantic typology.

In Chs. 1 and 2, Y introduces the basic notion of grammatical modularity and discusses several instances of how the mismatch between the modules illustrates modular autonomy. Furthermore, Y discusses how multimodular approaches formally distinguish prototypical and nonprototypical syntactic and semantic constructions. Following this theoretical foundation, Y presents a series of case-studies drawing primarily from English and Japanese data.

Ch. 3 examines English pseudo-coordinate conditionals and Japanese te-coordination. These two constructions are shown to be mirror-images of each other: English pseudo-coordinate conditionals are syntactically symmetrical and semantically asymmetrical, while te-coordination has some syntactic properties typical of Japanese subordinate clauses but semantically behaves like coordinated clauses. Y finds this unsurprising because it is a direct consequence of rigorously autonomous modules engendered by her theoretical framework.

Ch. 4 focuses on nonrestrictive relative clauses and demonstrates how nonrestrictive relative clauses differ from restrictive relative clauses in terms of scope relations, tense, adverbs, modal verbs, VP-deletion, and antecedent-contained deletion. In all respects, nonrestrictive relative clauses are more similar to independent clauses than to subordinate clauses. After discussing the shortcomings of previous analyses, Y provides her own account based on modular autonomy: that the two types of relative clauses, although syntactically similar, differ in their semantic properties because they are each generated independently, in a separate module, by separate generative rules.

In Ch. 5, Y looks at performative adverbial clauses, yet another kind of clausal mismatch. Performative adverbial clauses (He’s telling a lie, because he’s sweating) behave like independent clauses, not like subordinate clauses in terms of scope, tense, adverbial and modal modification, and VP-deletion. Once again, the explanation is modular autonomy: performative adverbial clauses are subordinate only in syntax but behave like fully independent clauses in semantics and pragmatics.

Ch. 6 surveys categorial mismatch. Traditional Japanese grammar has long identified the unusual properties of certain subordinating conjunctions that behave in some respects like complementizers, in other respects like regular nouns. For Y, this is mysterious only if one assumes rigorous isomorphism between modules. Because multimodular analyses do not make this assumption, they allow for precisely such mixed categories.

Y’s primary interest is the larger philosophical question for linguistics: what is the value of apparently exceptional data, and what should the response to these exceptional data be? One mode of thought moves all such data to the theoretical periphery—often of a poorly-defined status—much as the orbit of Mercury was inexplicable in physics until relativity came along. Another mode of thought takes exceptions at face value, accepting the need to abandon previous analyses in favor of something new. Y’s work makes a strong case that the latter attitude is appropriate for these English and Japanese data, thus making an important contribution to the scientific methodology of linguistics.

References

Culicover, Peter W. and Ray Jackendoff. 2005. Simpler syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sadock, Jerrold M. 1991. Autolexical syntax: A theory of parallel grammatical representations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.