Structures and beyond: The cartography of syntactic structures, vol. 3 (review)

This volume grew out of a workshop held at the Certosa di Pontignano of the University of Siena. The workshop, which took place in connection with Noam Chomsky’s stay at the University of Siena during the fall of 1999, was part of the Cartographic Research Project, which deals with the hierarchical organization of language structure and aims at drawing fine-grained maps of clause structure, thereby identifying different types of structural positions. The present collection of the (revised) conference papers continues the series of cartographic volumes edited by Cinque (2002) and Rizzi (2004). Unlike its predecessors, which are specifically related to cartographic issues, Adriana Belletti’s volume connects the cartographic studies with other approaches to the study of language structure, and thus takes a wider perspective on current theoretical and experimental research on language.

The articles of this volume, written by leading representatives of the field, relate the Cartographic Project to recent developments of Chomsky’s minimalist program, of Kayne’s antisymmetric approach, and of research into the syntax-semantic interface, as well as fundamental issues in experimental neurolinguistics and psycholinguistics. Although the articles are not grouped according to their topics but are given in alphabetical order by author, my review classifies them into three major research areas, and thus follows the organization of the instructive introduction written by Belletti. In the introduction, Belletti crucially points out that the apparent tension that seems to exist between the rich functional structures postulated by the Cartographic Project and the minimalist attempt to reduce structural complexity can in fact be taken to be merely apparent if the functional positions are all interpretable and thus do not conflict with the minimalist principle of full interpretation.

There are three papers that deal with minimalist issues and questions of antisymmetric syntax. The chapter by N oamC homsky(‘Beyond explanatory adequacy’, 104–31) proceeds from the ‘biolinguistic’ assumption that the properties of the language L acquired by the child result from the interaction of three factors: (i) the genetically determined initial state S ₀(also called the ‘universal grammar’); (ii) the individual experience (also called the ‘primary linguistic data’), which determines the transition from the initial state S ₀to L; and, finally, (iii) general properties of organic systems. Since the faculty of language interacts with other organic systems such as the sensorimotor and the conceptual-intentional system, these systems impose ‘interface conditions’ on this faculty that provide what Chomsky calls ‘the principled elements of S ₀’ (106) and explain (‘beyond explanatory adequacy’) why the properties of language are the way they are. ‘Narrow syntax’ is based on the fundamental operations ‘external’ and ‘internal’ Merge, both conceptually motivated by requirements of the conceptual-intentional system: external Merge is a structure-building device for the generation of argument structures; internal Merge (movement) is motivated by nontheta-theoretic semantic conditions that concern scopal and discourse-related (informational) properties. Chomsky’s paper further provides interesting modifications and refinements of the theory of phases developed in Chomsky 2001. Phases are seen as those stages of the syntactic derivation where units constructed by the narrow syntax are transferred to the phonological and the semantic component, which then derive the interface representations <;PHON, SEM>. Since the latter are accessed by external organic systems, they have to satisfy a condition of ‘legibility’. Chomsky provides empirical and conceptual motivation for the assumption that all operations in narrow syntax (Agree, Movement, and Transfer) are driven by properties of the heads of phases and apply simultaneously. He furthermore answers the question of why these operations exist and shows that they can receive a principled explanation.

In line with Chomsky’s elimination of Spec-Head agreement, M ichaelS tarke’s contribution (‘On the inexistence of specifiers and the nature of heads’, 252–68) argues for the inexistence of specifiers since specifiers redundantly contain the same features as heads and only ‘add space’ around heads. He tries to show that the head...