The mind of a savant: Language learning and modularity By Neil Smith and Ianthi- Maria Tsimpli (review)

REVIEWS849 between the syntactic position of an element and its semantic scope might arise from different syntactic and semantic parses of the same elements rather than from raising, lowering, or percolation operations. The symmetry S has in mind is attractive, and some cases he mentions look promising, such as the fact that right attaches to PPs in English but can have the meaning of an adverb like 'immediately' modifying the whole VP (as in I'll pick it right up). Other cases seem possible but undermotivated. For example, S suggests that certain cases of incorporation like causative sase in Japanese or noun incorporation in Iroquoian may not be instances of simple morphology and complex syntax but rather instances of simple syntax associated with complex semantics. Here I felt that S is needlessly narrow about what he counts as syntactic and invalidly takes 'absence of evidence for syntactic complexity' to be 'evidence for absence of syntactic complexity'. Finally, at the outer limits of his work, S suggests that perhaps one can even distinguish semantic incorporation from semantic cliticization; however, I was unable to grasp the true distinction between the two on the basis of the discussion presented. While S's approach is a very original one, it is not unprecedented. One limitation of the book is that there is relatively little comparison between autolexical syntax and related proposals made by others, such as Marantz's notion of merger, the government-binding notion of coanalysis, or certain features of lexical functional grammar. Also, S's automatic assumption that nonderivational accounts are better than derivational ones comes across as slightly naive. In fact, the two approaches can be seen as quite similar: autolexical syntax allows arbitrary differences across levels and then limits those differences by syntagmatic constraints like the LC and the CIC; derivational theories presuppose similarity across levels and then open up the possibility for limited differences via constrained movement (or merger, or other relations). It is quite possible that these two points of view could converge on roughly the same theory. Overall, the strengths of S's book are the beautiful simplicity of its leading idea and the progress it makes toward developing a typology ofmismatch phenomena, including the discovery of several significant generalizations as to what types of mismatch are possible. Its limitations are that it does not attempt to analyze any one body of facts in great depth; it is content to take as axioms certain principles or generalizations that may have deeper causes; and it does not undertake serious theory comparison. It is a very intriguing contribution, and I recommend it as a starting point and source book for those interested in orienting themselves to the issues and phenomena on the morphology-syntax interface. It also provides a healthy challenge to anyone subscribing to a more complex theory than S's to prove that we really need more than his very spare and elegant theoretical machinery. REFERENCES Marantz, Alec. 1984. On the nature of grammatical relations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. -----. 1988. Clitics, morphological merger, and the mapping to phonological structure. Theoretical morphology , ed. by Michael Hammond and Michael Noonan, 253-70. New York: Academic Press. Department of Linguistics McGiIl University 1001 Sherbrooke St. W. Montreal, PQ H3A 1G5 Canada The mind of a savant: Language learning and modularity. By Neil Smith and IanthiMaria Tsimpli. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1995. Pp. 243. Reviewed by Victoria M. Garlock and Elaina M. Frieda, University ofAlabama, Birmingham* Adam, Eve, Sarah, Victor, Genie ... their case studies have been both nomothetic and idiographic , revealing as much about our general psycholinguistic nature as they have about the * We would like to thank Lauren Randazza and Dr. Amanda Walley for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this review. This work was supported by the Department of Psychology at the University of Alabama, Birmingham and by NICHHD Grant HD 30398. 850LANGUAGE, VOLUME 73, NUMBER 4 (1997) particular abilities of the individuals themselves. The name Christopher can now be added to the list. Christopher exhibits multilinguistic prowess in the face of severe cognitive impairments, a dissociation that makes him unique among this distinguished group. Recognizing that this unusual constellation ofabilities could shed valuable light on cognitive theory, Smith...