{"id":48,"date":"2008-03-20T14:22:02","date_gmt":"2008-03-20T12:22:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=48"},"modified":"2008-07-31T15:26:28","modified_gmt":"2008-07-31T13:26:28","slug":"the-function-of-function-words-and-functional-categories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=48","title":{"rendered":"The function of function words and functional categories"},"content":{"rendered":"

The function of function words and functional categories.<\/strong> By Marcel den Dikken <\/strong>and Christina M. Tortora<\/strong>. (Linguistik aktuell\/Linguistics today 78.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2005. Pp. 293. ISBN <\/a>9789027228024<\/a>. $162 (Hb).<\/font><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Asya Pereltsvaig<\/strong><\/a>, Stanford University<\/em><\/font><\/p>\n

This volume is a collection of papers presented at the 19th Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop, held at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. The papers selected for this volume all address the question of the function of function words and functional categories. This is a brief outline of the contributions in the volume.<\/font><\/p>\n

C. Jan-Wouter Zwart<\/strong> challenges the widely adopted hypothesis that morphological properties of functional heads (in this instance, on the left periphery) are responsible for whether a language does or does not exhibit verb second. Instead, he places verb second in the domain of narrow syntax and analyzes it as a positional dependency marking strategy. Verb second is also the topic of Ute Bohnacker<\/strong>\u2019s article, which examines the second language acquisition of this phenomenon by Swedish learners of German. <\/font><\/p>\n

The article by Josef Bayer, Tanja Schmid, <\/strong>and Markus Bader<\/strong> concentrates on the functional superstructure of embedded control infinities with zu<\/em>, focusing on German (but discussing also Dutch and Bangla). They argue that while \u2018extraposed\u2019 zu-<\/em>infinitives are CPs with a null functional head, \u2018intraposed\u2019 zu-<\/em>infinitives that exhibit no clause-union properties cannot be taken to be null-headed CPs: they project no further than VP. The C-head once again plays an important role in the paper by Marc Richards <\/strong>and Theresa Biberauer<\/strong>, which concerns itself with the question of how best to explain the distribution of expletives in the Germanic languages. Their central hypothesis is that expletives may only be merged in the specifier positions of phase heads\u2014C and v<\/em>. The former introduces expletives such as German es<\/em>, while the latter is the merge-site of English-type there-<\/em>expletives. The contribution by Marika Lekakou<\/strong> is related in as much as she is concerned with the question of whether reflexive markers such as German sich<\/em> and Dutch zich<\/em> are argumental lexical categories or dummy functional categories (like the expletives). She argues that while German sich<\/em> can be either an argument or what she calls a marker of valency reduction, Dutch zich<\/em> is systematically an argument. The article by Guido Vanden Wyngaerd<\/strong> is concerned with constructions in English where the simple present is used episodically, namely sports commentaries and performatives. His central observation is that all such constructions denote an event of \u2018very short duration\u2019 (in contrast to languages like Dutch). <\/font><\/p>\n

The final two papers in this volume are concerned with functional categories in the nominal domain. The article by Marit Julien<\/strong> is a detailed study of possessive noun phrases throughout Scandinavian, bringing together an impressive array of empirical facts and discussing them against the background of a uniform base configuration, with surface variation resulting from movement operations in the course of the overt syntactic derivation. The paper by Dorian Roehrs<\/strong> zooms in on the left periphery of the extended noun phrase, looking at fillers of the D-head. His central claim is that the approach to phrases like us linguists<\/em> that takes the pronoun to be in D is correct; yet, he argues that all D-elements are moved to D from a lower functional category. <\/font><\/p>\n

Overall, this volume makes an excellent contribution to the study of microparametric Germanic syntax as well as to syntactic theory in general.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The function of function words and functional categories. By Marcel den Dikken and Christina M. Tortora. (Linguistik aktuell\/Linguistics today 78.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2005. Pp. 293. ISBN 9789027228024. $162 (Hb). Reviewed by Asya Pereltsvaig, Stanford University This volume is a collection of papers presented at the 19th Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop, held at the Graduate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=48"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=48"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=48"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=48"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}