Reviewed by Agnieszka Pysz, Adam Mickiewicz University

As stated in the introduction, this Festschrift does not aspire to do full justice to the breadth of Günther Grewendorf’s interests. It does, however, aim to reflect his body of work as justly as possible. The volume, which includes twenty-three contributions by Grewendorf’s students, friends, and colleagues, is divided into three parts, each of which reflects a separate area of Grewendorf’s research. Part 1,‘Form’, revolves around the domains of morphology, lexical semantics, and their interface with syntax; Part 2, ‘Structure’, is dominated by issues concerning information structure (IS); and Part 3, ‘Grammar’, examines the language faculty as well as the interface of core grammar with the systems of interpretation and use.

Part 1, which contains six articles, opens with Werner Abraham’s discussion of the mechanics of underspecification, which is based on the differences between superficially identical participial forms. Manfred Bierwisch presents an analysis of German reflexives that captures their peculiar behavior. Sascha W. Felix considers learnability problems related to the acquisition of Japanese word structure. Tilman N. Höhle deals with the variation observed in three-verb clusters in German dialects. Manfred Krifka provides an account of the pronoun system and the predicate marker in Tok Pisin. An original treatment of pro-drop is offered by Gereon Müller, who builds his proposal on the key concept of impoverishment.

Part 2 consists of ten papers. Josef Bayer deals with A’-movement in the left periphery of German sentences. He reconsiders some aspects of operator status and weak crossover. Adriana Belletti advances a uniform analysis of Italian constructions that involve clitic left dislocation and relative clauses with resumption. Werner Frey gives an account of the German object pronoun es appearing in clause-initial position. Gisbert Fanselow furnishes conceptual and empirical arguments against the idea of encoding IS directly in the syntax. IS phenomena are also discussed by Katharina Hartmann and Malte Zimmermann, who draw on the Chadic language Dghweɗe. The focus of Cecilia Poletto’s contribution is scrambling in Old Italian. Luigi Rizzi puts forward an analysis of inversion phenomena in Romance (in general) and Italian (in particular). Joachim Sabel argues for a link between the morphological properties of the C-system and the (non-)availability of nonfinite interrogatives and relatives. Mamoru Saito, referring to data from Japanese, supports an analysis of there-sentences via associate raising or expletive replacement. Jochen Zeller investigates applicatives in the Bantu language Kinyarwanda, which he proposes are best analyzed in terms of preposition incorporation.

Part 3 includes seven contributions. Rainer Dietrich addresses the question of whether the language faculty obeys its own rhythm or whether it is clocked along with other cognitive abilities. Hans-Martin Gärtner and Markus Steinbach argue against employing exclusively syntactic tools to handle phenomena related to speech acts and point of view. Georg Meggle offers a philosophical discussion of the evolution of human language in the context of Charles Darwin’s package hypothesis. Monika Rathert looks at the issue of comprehensibility in forensic linguistics through the prism of frame semantics. Tom Roeper’s contribution is devoted to the syntax of focus binding. Dietmar Zaefferer reconsiders some of his and Grewendorf’s ideas about the conceptualization of sentence mood. Finally, Thomas Ede Zimmermann examines the status of semantic values assigned to linguistic expressions by ‘realistic’ semantic theories.

One of the major strengths of this volume lies in its broad spectrum of topics. The book is, undoubtedly, a worthy tribute to Grewendorf. It is also a valuable publication that documents a range of important strands in theoretical linguistics.