Current Studies in Italian Syntax: Essays Offered to Lorenzo Renzi (review)

This volume is a collection of sixteen essays on various topics in Italian syntax that were collected to honor Lorenzo Renzi, a scholar who has promoted research on Italian syntax since the 1960s, and who has been editor of the Grande Grammatica Italiana di Consultazione (Bologna: Il Mulino) together with Giampaolo Salvi and Anna Cardinaletti.

While the volume targets syntacticians, Romance linguists, and students of Italian, a background knowledge of generative syntax is necessary to fully understand the content of the book. Paolo Acquaviva’s opening chapter, ‘Syntactic intervention effects on Italian polarity items’, considers polarity items in Italian and the extent to which they can be accounted for by the intermediate scope constraint proposed for English polarity items. In ‘Speculations on the possible source of expletive negation in Italian comparative clauses’, Adriana Belletti addresses the issue of expletive negation in subjunctive comparative clauses. In ‘The position of topic and focus on the left periphery’, Paola Benincà considers the fine structure of the left periphery, utilizing the so-called ‘cartographic’ approach. The fourth chapter is dedicated by Franco Benucci to ‘Aspect prefixes in verbal periphrases in Italian and other Romance languages’. Pier Marco Bertinetto examines tense in ‘ “Propulsive” tenses in modern Italian fiction prose’. In the sixth chapter, Anna Cardinaletti considers the issue of right dislocation in Italian, showing that the VO-S order is obtained by the right dislocation of the subject and motivated by antisymmetry requirements. ‘ “Restructuring” and the order of aspectual and modal heads’, by Guglielmo Cinque, examines the relative order of aspectual and modal heads in the clause.

In ‘The birth of a functional category: From Latin ILLE to the Romance article and personal pronoun’, Giuliana Giusti proposes that the shift from Latin ILLE to the Romance definite article is due to the reinterpretation of a phrase in a specifier position as the head of the same phrase. In ‘Romance causatives and dynamic antisymmetry’, Maria Teresa Guasti and Andrea Moro show how the word order of some Romance causative constructions provides evidence for Moro’s theory of ‘dynamic antisymmetry’. Richard Kayne, in ‘A note on clitic doubling in French’, proposes that French pronominal arguments that are Case-marked must be doubled by a clitic. In ‘Either “subject-oriented” or merely sentential’, Lidia Lonzi states that left-adjunction is a better solution than base-generation in the specifier of an XP for so-called subject-oriented adverbs. Maria Rita Manzini and Leonardo Savoia’s ‘The syntax of object clitics: si in Italian dialects’ examines the distribution of the clitic si in several Italian dialects. Cecilia Poletto’s ‘Complementizer deletion and verb movement in standard Italian’ also examines the left periphery of the clause, as does Luigi Rizzi’s ‘On the position “int(errogative)” in the left periphery of the clause’, where the existence of an interrogative phrase projection is postulated. In ‘The two sentence structures of Early Romance’, Giampaolo Salvi discusses a little-known subordinate sentence in early Romance. Finally, Christina Tortora provides ‘Evidence for a null locative in Italian’.

This book is a rich source of information for those who are interested in the syntax of Romance languages.