Reviewed by Agnieszka Pysz, Adam Mickiewicz University

Based on his doctoral dissertation, in this volume, Constantino Martínez Fabián provides an optimality theory (OT) treatment of coordination patterns in Yaqui, a Uto-Aztecan language.

In the extensive introduction, MF describes three specific aspects of coordination: (i) the position of the coordinator with respect to conjuncts, (ii) unbalanced coordination instantiated by verbal chaining structures, and (iii) asymmetric noun-verb agreement patterns observed in coordinated objects and coordinated subjects. He also provides information on Yaqui word order and a basic introduction to OT.

Ch. 2 reviews the previous research on coordination. MF describes several theoretical frameworks that have previously been used to account for the data, including head driven phrase structure grammar, minimalism, OT, lexical functional grammar, principles and parameters, and autolexical approaches.

Ch. 3 focuses on patterns of sentence coordination in Yaqui. MF singles out one coordinator, into(ko) ‘and’, and describes its distributional properties. Based on the data, he argues that Yaqui coordination poses a challenge for most theoretical accounts and suggests an OT-based proposal, which accommodates the Yaqui data by means of an adjunct-host relation coupled with a set of OT constraints.

Ch. 4 starts with a discussion of verbal balanced coordination (i.e. coordinated verbs that do not differ in inflection). MF then turns to unbalanced coordination—specifically, cases in which only the last verb in a series carries overt inflection, as in the so-called –kai constructions. Such constructions share a number of characteristics. For instance, they are interpreted as a single event, they involve verbs marked with the suffix –kai, and they consist of conjuncts whose order tends to be sequential. MF suggests an OT account that captures these characteristics.

Ch. 5 deals with number agreement phenomena in verbs and coordinated nominals. MF demonstrates that, although coordinated objects require a transitive verb to be morphologically singular, coordinated subjects require an intransitive verb to be plural. He observes that this asymmetry is not readily handled by many analyses—in particular, lexical functional grammar accounts. MF proposes an alternative that captures the Yaqui agreement patterns via the ranking of OT constraints.

The volume is not free from conspicuous language errors and editorial lapses, which undoubtedly detract from its quality. Nevertheless, this book makes an interesting contribution to the existing research on coordination and should inspire future investigations in the area.