The sound patterns of syntax (review)

This collection of papers is based on a workshop organized by the volume editors and inspired by their own work on ‘phonological effects on word order’ (1), which led them to the conclusion that prosodic properties, along with aspects of information structure, may determine word order in certain languages. This finding raises ‘serious architectural questions’ (1), including the question of whether and how information structure (IS), which potentially affects both syntax and phonology, fits into the architecture of the grammar. That this topic is of high interest in current linguistic theory is also reflected in the growing number of workshops and special journal issues dealing with the syntax/prosody/information structure interface.

Including a short introduction by the editors, the book contains sixteen contributions, covering awide range of languages, phenomena, and research topics. While the table of contents simply lists the individual chapters but suggests no particular organization, the introduction (Ch. 1) reveals that the fifteen original contributions are organized as follows. Chs. 2–9 ‘deal with word-order phenomena’ (2): they are ‘Adjunction and 3D phrase structure’ by Tor A. Åfarli; ‘The phonology of adverb placement, object shift, andV2: The case of Danish “MON” ’by Nomi Erteschik-Shir; ‘Is free postverbal order in Hungarian a syntactic or a PF phenomenon?’ by Katalin É. Kiss; ‘Why float? Floating quantifiers and focus marking’ by Lisa Rochman; ‘Prosodic prominence: A syntactic matter?’ by João Costa; ‘On the mechanics of Spell-Out’ by Steven Franks; ‘Semantic and discourse interpretation of the Japanese left periphery’ by Mamoru Saito; and ‘Rhythmic patterns cue word order’ by Mohinish Shukla and Marina Nespor.

Chs. 10–15 ‘deal with various prosodic issues’ (2): ‘Object clauses, movement, and phrasal stress’ by Hubert Truckenbrodt and Isabelle Darcy; ‘Optimality theory and the theory of phonological phrasing: The Chimwiini evidence’ by Charles W. Kisseberth; ‘Functional complementarity is only skin-deep: Evidence from Egyptian Arabic for the autonomy of syntax and phonology in the expression of focus’ by Sam Hellmuth; ‘Syntax, information structure, embedded prosodic phrasing, and the relational scaling of pitch accents’ by Caroline Féry; ‘Deconstructing the nuclear stress algorithm: Evidence from second language speech’ by Emily Nava and Maria Luisa Zubizarreta; and ‘Focus as a grammatical notion: A case study in autism’ by Kriszta Szendrői. Ch. 16, ‘Intermodular argumentation: Morpheme-specific phonologies are out of business in a phase-based architecture’ by Tobias Scheer, provides ‘evidence from word stress for an intermodular grammar’ (2).

The introduction touches on two previous approaches to the syntax-phonology interface (1–2), which represent two extreme views: Bobaljik’s (2002) copy theory of movement, a solely syntactic account, and Erteschik-Shir’s (2005a, b) radically phonological approach to word order. Both views are represented by contributions to the volume. In the remainder of the introduction, the editors confine themselves to paragraph-long summaries of the content of each paper. There is no state-of-the art introduction to the topic(s) of the volume or a general overview of the major theoretical insights.

The book is heterogeneous in many respects. Most papers offer new insights into familiar empirical phenomena and research topics. These topics include the construction of phonological phrases (e.g. the chapter by Kisseberth on phrasing in Chimwiini, 217–46), approaches to scrambling in different languages, such as Japanese A- and A′-scrambling (cf. the paper by Saito, 140–73), Hungarian postverbal constituent order (cf. the paper by É. Kiss, 53–71), and aspects of nuclear stress (Naval and Zubizarreta’s contribution (291–316) offering second language (L2) evidence). Szendrői’s chapter (317–32) is innovative in that it uses an autistic person in its experimental setting, which is designed to address the question of whether focus is a linguistic (language-specific, grammatical) concept or an...