Reviewed by Elizabeth Pyatt, Penn State

One of themes of the minimalist syntax theory has been to tie variations in word order across languages to different inflectional and agreement features that can be set as either ‘strong’ or ‘weak’. Exploring the structure of a VSO language like Welsh is an ideal case study to explore different aspects of minimalism—including parameters for subject position—and this is exactly the goal of Ian Robert’s book.

R’s study is divided into five chapters. Ch. 1, ‘The analysis of VSO languages’ (7–46), reviews past linguistic analyses of VSO languages including Welsh and shows that the evidence in Welsh VSO order is the result of incomplete subject raising; that is, the verb raises to an inflectional head as in many SVO languages, but the subject raises only to some lower specifier position. In Ch. 2, ‘Case agreement and mutation’ (47–85), R discusses variations of subject agreement in Welsh and the ‘direct object mutation’ and makes various proposals on how agreement features are realized. The analyses proposed here crucially rely on assumptions of mutation and subject agreement that data may not be agreed upon by all Welsh linguists. Thus, this chapter could be considered controversial.

Ch. 3, ‘Genitive case, word order in DP and objects of non-finite verbs’ (87–118), focuses on the structure of Welsh DPs (including Welsh N to Q raising) and on nonfinite clauses. R argues that Welsh verbal nouns, although not true nouns, demonstrate some nominal properties and should be classified as participles. Ch. 4, ‘The C-system and the extended projection principle,’ examines focus movement in Welsh and V2 sentence structure in Middle Welsh and Breton, a sister language of Welsh. Finally, in Ch. 5, ‘Head-movement and EPP-features,’ R discusses theoretical implications for the extended projection principle and effects observed in Welsh and Breton as well as selected Northern Italian dialects and English.