The Proceedings of the Seventeenth West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (review)

The Proceedings of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics have become one of the most valuable tools when it comes to checking the state of the art in formal linguistics. Its seventeenth volume comprises 49 papers that, besides their intrinsic interest, serve as a useful guide for sailing through contemporary frameworks, checking the liveliness of major hypotheses, and wandering through the most relevant fields of work.

Throughout the proceedings, the very nature of the grammatical models that underpin contemporary research is questioned by examining the properties and scope of the processes they allow. Thus, interest in the characteristics of permissible movements ties together a first group of papers. Norvin Richards defends the derivational T-model by concentrating on the cross-linguistic properties of wh-movement. Uli Sauerland convincingly shows that A-movement can take place in the PF-branch of the derivation. Carlo Cecchetto and Gennaro Chierchia address ‘reconstruction effects’ by discussing clitic left dislocation in Italian, a type that seems to be hard to capture in pure syntactic terms. Anna Pettiward challenges the received view that ECM subjects undergo some form of movement into the higher clause. Mark D. Arnold studies the loss of English verb movement and, lastly, Adolfo Ausìn argues for a feature movement based analysis of some yes/no questions in English.

The status of null constituents is another area of interest. Both Christopher Kennedy and Winfried Lechner defend the position that local dependencies in comparative deletion are the result of movement. Jason Merchant treats elided constituents in sluicing contexts as pronominal e-type variables. Null morphemes are argued for in Olga BabkoMalaya’s theory of resultatives, and Tien-HsinHsin analyzes temporal and locative wh-phrases as involving incorporation of a null P.

The nature of functional categories is also questioned. By studying transitive expletive constructions, Olaf Koeneman and Ad Neeleman argue against assuming that language-particular functional projections should be claimed to be universal. Sjef Barbiers and Johan Rooryck’s analysis of existential sentences and the properties of focus phrases is a nice example of the interest in their semantic import. Two analyses make explicit use of them: Josè Bonneau, Pierre Pica, and Takashi Nakajima address modification within the DP, and John Foreman looks at negative inversion in nonstandard English.

Within the semantic realm, papers by Orin Percus and Marie-Hélène Côté represent the interest in using partial objects in the models. The former sketches a fascinating binding theory for a language with situations, and the latter makes use of event quantification to derive interesting properties of existentials.

Nonfinite forms are the concern of two works: Claudia Borgonovo and Sarah Cummins study predicable participles, and Chung-Hye Han examines negative imperatives.

Lexical semantics, specifically the pairing of semantic and syntactic selection, are addressed by Anthony Davis and Jean Pierre Koenig. The argument status of possessive datives, a type of semi-argument, is analyzed by Idan Landa, that of cognate objects by Asya Pereltsvaig.

Efforts dedicated to elucidating the properties of the syntax/semantics interface are well-represented. Jon Nissenbaum’s analysis of parasitic gaps provides empirical support for the claim that predication created by syntactic movement plays a role in syntax. However, of all topics within this area, the analysis of focus and related issues is of special concern. Gerhard Jäger provides a theory of focus without variables and Hae-Kyung Wee accounts for the island insensitivity...