Portuguese Syntax: New Comparative Studies (review)

Of the mainstream Romance languages, Portuguese is arguably the one least studied. Whatever the reasons for such lack of consideration, this book is a generative remedy. As João Costa points out in his ‘Introduction’ (3–13), in which he introduces some aspects of Portuguese and presents an overview of the papers collected in this volume, ‘[t]he exceptional properties of Portuguese clitic placement have long been a puzzle to Romance linguistics’ (3). It is for this reason, then, that over half of the contributions deal almost exclusively with this issue.

Of these papers, ‘Clitics: A window into the null subject property’ (31–94) by Pilar Barbosa is a very detailed study of the relation between the syntax of subjects and that of clitics. ‘Romance clitics and the minimalist program’ (116–42) is on the agenda of Inês Duarte and Gabriela Matos; the major proposal here is that enclisis is the underlying process of cliticization, with proclisis being a derived structure. Charlotte Galves, ‘Agreement, predication, and pronouns in the history of Portuguese’ (143–68), derives the different grammars of Classical, European, and Brazilian Portuguese from differences in realizing agreement. Ana Maria Martins, ‘A minimalist approach to clitic climbing’ (169–91), proposes concentrating on (and unifying) ECM- and control-structures, which does not confront the problem of optionality. In the final contribution to the volume, ‘Clitic positions and verb movement’ (266–98), Eduardo Raposo recaps the major theoretical approaches to clitic placement in general and proposes an interesting analysis for the difference between enclisis and proclisis in Portuguese that follows from whether the verb moves to a functional head or specifier position.

Let’s turn briefly to those contributions that don’t focus on clitics but address other interesting properties of Portuguese syntax. Assuming that both structures contain tense, Manuela Ambar contrasts ‘Infinitives versus participles’ (14–30) and proposes an account for their different behavior concerning tense, agreement, case, word order, passive, negation, and cliticization. João Costa’s own contribution deals with ‘Word order and discourse-configurationality in European Portuguese’ (94–115). He suggests that Portuguese objects scramble for defocusing purposes (as in Germanic). ‘First person plural anaphora in Brazilian Portuguese: Chains and constraint interaction in binding’ (191–240) is the title of Sérgio Menuzzi’s contribution that deals with how the morphological shape of pronominal forms interacts with syntactic constraints. Gertjan Postma, in ‘Distributive universal quantification and aspect in Brazilian Portuguese’ (241–65), spells out the assumption that specificity and other semantic information is encoded in the syntactic structure.

This book is a most welcome addition to the study of comparative syntax. It is ever so important for Romance syntax in particular as it sheds light on some ‘Romance-typical’ properties in which Portuguese just differs (such as the behavior of clitics). Another positive aspect of this volume concerns the micro-parametric level of variation; some papers deal with (differences between) European and Brazilian Portuguese, and one even with diachronic aspects of the language. All in all, we’re dealing with another great book in a very successful series.