The Minimalist Parameter: Selected Papers From the Open Linguistics Forum, Ottawa, 21-23 March 1997 (review)

The minimalist parameter is a remarkable volume because it clearly shows that generative grammarians form a world-wide scientific community. This collection is a record of papers read at the ‘Challenges of minimalism’ session of the Open Linguistic Forum. The range of languages represented is impressive: The papers contain data not only from English, French, Spanish, and German, but also from Japanese, Hebrew, Insular and Mainland Scandinavian, Italian, Catalan, Greek, Hindi, Arabic, Korean, Western Apache, Hungarian, Mandarin Chinese, and Yiddish.

The minimalist program is not a settled theory yet, and it is natural for it to grow in order to stay healthy. In this respect, the volume contains a number of papers which challenge its propositions by developing certain points or by suggesting an alternative. Denis Bouchard (3–32) opens the discussion with a statement that one property presented as central in the standard minimalist model as a principle turns out to be a contingent property, that is, a parameter setting. Sharon Armon-Lotem (65–76) proposes that Checking is a unified process applied only after Spell-out, thus contradicting the assumption that ‘strong’ features should be checked only after Spellout. Masanori Nakamura (101–12) argues that the notion of interpretability is important also in the determination of the ‘reference set’ and in the application of economy conditions. Andrew Simpson (191–204) examines a paradigm of wh- and negation-related data whose patterning would seem to seriously question the uniformity hypothesis. Julie Anne Legate and Carolyn Smallwood (207–26) argue that the feature [D] is insufficient to account for the range of crosslinguistic variation found among human languages.

The majority of the reports, however, investigate certain phenomena in the general frames of the minimalist approach. Susan Powers (33–50) thinks that a minimalist account can be useful for reasons of economy and empirical coverage of phrase structure acquisition, for it directly explains how development proceeds as merge sucessfully combines phrase markers from earlier stages. Hiroyuki Ura (51–64) demonstrates that the theory of multiple F-checking gives a natural explanation of data found in a variety of languages with a limited set of parameters. Artemis Alexiadou and Elena Anagnostopoulou (175–90) investigate the syntactic conditions of the placement of postverbal subjects in transitive and intransitive constructions. Kerstin Hoge (233–48) attempts to reanalyze the that-t effect. Virginia Motapanyane (249–60) gives a new account for crosslinguistic variation in focus constructions and interrogative clauses between Romanian and English-type languages. Other contributors are John Whitman, Takashi Toyoshima, Adam Szczegielniak, Anikó Csirmaz, Ning Zhang, Satoshi Oku, Juan Romero-Morales and Norberto Moreno-Quibén, Huba Bartos, Luis Silva-Villar and Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach, and Bernadette Plunkett.

The volume is aimed at a rather narrow range of linguists working within the generative syntactic paradigm. It is impossible to grasp the essence of such complicated analyses without a background knowledge of the subject. However, the language of the papers is as concise as the discussion permits it to be. All the articles have abstracts, separately listed in the appendix. Along with the index of names, the list makes the volume very convenient for future reference.