Discovering syntax: Clause structures of English, German and Romance (review)

This volume brings together articles and chapters published over a period of fifteen years. Their unifying theme is that they deal with topics and phenomena that initially may look incompatible with the approach developed in Emonds 2000. The latter can be characterized as a subcategorization-based version of transformational grammar (or subcategorization-based transformational grammar) based on two leading ideas: (i) 'sub-categorization is the sole lexical device for stating co-occurrence restrictions' (27), and (ii) '(only) grammatical items are inserted late in transformational derivations' (1). The volume is divided into three parts that reflect the tripartite division of clause structure: the VP domain, the IP domain, and the CP domain.

Part 1, 'Structures in lexical projections', examines the internal structure of the VP domain in English, in particular subcategorization-based complementation. Ch. 1, 'Types of syntactic categories and features', deals with types of syntactic categories and recalls the formal distinction in Emonds 2000 between open-class lexical items and grammatical items, the latter including instances of N, V, A, and P. Open-class lexical items have semantic features, which play no role in syntax, in addition to syntactic features. In contrast, grammatical items have only syntactic features. From this distinction follows the possibility that grammatical items can be inserted at d-structure, during derivation, or at PF ('late insertion'), which is later exploited to account for the key properties of some phenomena.

Ch. 1 ends with an appendix on small clauses ('The status of small clauses'), which, while autonomous in some respects, also serves as an introduction to later chapters dealing with complementation. The appendix evaluates existing arguments for the small-clause analysis of multiple complements involving secondary predication and concludes that the analysis should be abandoned on the grounds that it represents an unnecessary and unwarranted intrusion on syntax of an essentially semantic category (subject + predicate = proposition = syntactic phrase). The argument based on binary branching is shown to be empirically unmotivated for all of the relevant complementation contexts and, although it may serve a useful purpose in default situations, it cannot be given primacy over structures based on subcategorization, which can only yield nonbinary structures in situations of multiple complementation.

Ch. 2, 'The restricted complement space of lexical frames', shows how complements, including multiple complements that gave rise to the small-clause analysis, can be assigned a syntactic analysis based on subcategorization. The patterns of complementation found in English are argued to reduce to a limited range of subcategorization frames that collectively define the 'complement space' and ultimately constrain the range of possible lexical entries. This objective is part of the general endeavor to demonstrate that the lexicon is highly structured and to develop 'an almost exclusively syntactic theory of the lexicon' (66).

Ch. 3, 'The autonomy of the (syntactic) lexicon and syntax', deals with nonfinite complementation in English (gerunds, infinitives, and participles). It reduces the seemingly different types of nonfinite complements to a unified lexical representation in the context of an analysis that exploits the idea that grammatical items may be inserted at any stage in derivation. Thus, while the substantivizing -ing has a single lexical entry, it may be inserted either at d-structure or at PF, which in turn depends on whether its insertion frame is specified for semantic features. Insertion at d-structure correlates with selection of the type associated with nouns and adjectives. By contrast, insertion at PF correlates with the well-known verbal properties of gerunds and participles.

Ch. 4, 'Secondary predication, stationary particles, and silent prepositions', deals with post-verbal particles and pursues the same strategy of reducing distributional patterns to unified sub-categorization in combination with general and independently needed principles.

Ch. 5, 'Projecting indirect objects', deals with double-object or dative-shift constructions and defends an analysis for them that involves movement of the indirect object. The potential conflict with the projection principle, the emergence of which resulted in excluding the movement analysis that had previously been widely...