Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics 3: The College Park Meeting, and: Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics 4: The Cornell Meeting, and: Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics 5: The Indiana Meeting (review)

These three volumes comprise a total of 48 papers, presented during 1994–1996 at conferences on formal approaches to Slavic linguistics. The list of some 50 contributors includes many well-established linguists, both in Slavic linguistics and the wider field, and a number of young researchers. All the major Slavic languages are represented along with discussion of languages such as Slovenian and the Western Ukrainian dialect, Hutsul, that have received less attention in the formal anglophone literature.

The theoretical frameworks adopted are mostly, but not solely, generative. Only four of the papers deal with phonology, and one paper by Irina Sekerina (4:435–63) presents work on syntactic processing and scrambling. Otherwise, the papers focus on syntax. The topics that receive most attention mirror popular topics in generative cross-linguistic syntax at the time: participle-auxiliary word orders, the representation of aspect in the functional hierarchy above the verb phrase, multiple wh-questions, and case assignment.

The articles tackling wh-movement employ a variety of generative approaches that do not obviously feed into each other. Loren Billings and Catherine Rudin (3:35–60) present an early optimality account of multiple wh-movement in Bulgarian, focusing on the interplay between [+/−human], [+/−animate], and case in the relative order of fronted wh-words. Fresh data are added to the more familiar data to demonstrate that syntactic superiority (Chomsky 1973) alone is inadequate to account for word order restrictions. An optimality theoretic approach is well-suited to the task, though the theory-internal requirement that any constraint must be a universal should perhaps have motivated further cross-linguistic discussion, if only within Slavic languages. Željko Bošković (5:86–107) reiterates significant developments in Bošković (1995) that Serbo-Croatian matrix questions do not exhibit overt wh-movement (hence the lack of superiority effects); rather they display focus movement to agreement phrases. The latter part of the article addresses some residual problems, particularly the nature of the relation between focus and wh-movement in embedded contexts. Once the possibilities of focus checking in both agreement phrases and CP are set up, the question becomes how to rule out focus checking prior to overt wh-movement in embedded contexts to avoid ungrammatical word orders. Among other proposals, the theory requires the introduction of additional machinery to check clause type (e.g. interrogative or declarative). In a useful contribution to the literature, Marija Golden (4:240–66) shows that Slovene also displays no superiority effects in multiple wh-fronting, yet allows long-distance wh-extraction of more than a single wh-element out of embedded clauses. In an essentially descriptive account, the author demonstrates that Slovene undermines the multiple and nonmultiple wh-fronting typology established in Rudin’s (1988) seminal article. Arthur Stepanov and Carol Georgopolous (5:275–94) address the fact that Russian long wh-movement is blocked by an embedded indicative complementizer but not by a complementizer marked for the subjunctive. Their early minimalist account turns on relating wh-clauses to subjunctive clauses (both are said to involve irrealis feature checking in C) and a novel parameterization of merge and move.

Several papers in vol. 3 tackle the evidence in favor of aspectual functional projections though there is a tendency here for substantive empirical observations to be merely clothed...