Nominals: Inside and Out (review)

This volume is a collection of eight papers that deal with the syntax of nominal constructions within the framework of lexical-functional grammar (LFG). It is the first such publication on nominals exclusively in this framework. In addition to LFG, many of the papers in this volume incorporate other theoretical frameworks into their discussions, including optimality theory (OT) and constructive morphology. These are noted below. The papers are divided into three categories, which the editors entitle ‘Nominals from the outside’, ‘Nominals from the inside’, and ‘Nominals: Inside and out’. The first section concerns how nominals interact with other elements in the clause, where issues such as case and agreement constitute the majority of the discussion. The second section, as the title suggests, deals with internal properties of nominals, including some traditionally troublesome aspects of derived nominals, thematic roles, and event structure. The third section, consisting of a single paper, deals with the problem of gerunds from the point of view of their behavior as a mixed category.

Hanjung Lee’s paper integrates OT with LFG to account for a crosslinguistic typology of case and case alternation systems, including split ergative/accusative systems. Empirically, this paper includes a discussion on putatively optional case marking in Korean. Lee appeals to corpus data and offers a variationist perspective on the facts that points toward an analysis in which accusative case marking varies with referentiality of the object. He also discusses split ergativity in Hindi.

Devyani Sharma offers a unified approach to discourse and case markers in Hindi, within the framework of LFG and constructive morphology. First, she defends such an approach by highlighting the parallel behavior of discourse and case markers. Her analysis accounts for restrictions on multiple foci, particularly in examples where embedded foci are visible at the clause level.

Louisa Sadler discusses the crosslinguistically robust and troublesome phenomenon of coordination and single conjunct agreement, looking specifically at Welsh. She notes a crosslinguistic generalization in which asymmetric agreement manifests itself in VS word order only. Welsh, being a verb-initial language, always exhibits this agreement pattern. Sadler takes the approach that we must draw a distinction between IND, which expresses the resolved features of the coordinated nominal structure, and AGR, which expresses the features of the distinguished (i.e. agreed with) conjunct.

In the next paper, Anna Siewierska approaches the problem of how reduced pronominals and argument prominence covary as proposed by Joan Bresnan’s OT approach to the issue. Siewierska takes a broad typological approach, with a sample of 402 languages, and in the end, she substantiates most, but not all, of Bresnan’s claims.

Carmen Kelling’s contribution addresses the longstanding debate on whether deverbal nouns inherit the argument structure of the verbs from which they are derived. The data for her discussion come from French psych verbs and their deverbal counterparts. Kelling argues that deverbal nouns retain the same semantic arguments as their verbal sources, but that these arguments are optionally realized.

In their paper on possessive constructions, Erika Chisarik and John Payne compare two such constructions in English and in Hungarian. They propose that poss is not the only grammatical function for possessors in LFG, as is commonly assumed, but that subj and a new function they call adnom are also available. The authors account for the variety of possessor constructions found in English and Hungarian with their approach.

Looking at Hungarian again, Tibor Laczkó tackles the problem of the realization of arguments and adjuncts in event nominals. He examines three ways in which arguments can appear in nominalized constructions and demonstrates that phrase structural considerations are of primary importance for a comprehensive treatment of nominals.

In the last paper, John Mugane looks at deverbal nouns in the Bantu language Gĩkũyũ. He proposes a head sharing mechanism in which a lexical item corresponds to two heads...