Studies in Comparative Germanic Syntax: Proceedings from the 15th Workshop on Comparative Germanic Syntax (review)

This volume consists of a selection of fourteen papers that were presented at the 15th Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop, organized at the University of Groningen on May 26–27,2000. The proceedings are thematically organized into four sections, with an introduction by organizer C. Jan-Wouter Zwart. The first section deals with issues of sentence embedding in the Germanic languages and opens with a contribution by Marga Reis. By means of diagnostic tests she shows that German partial wh-movement involves both the syntax of extraction and the syntax of parenthesis. Jeroen van Craenenbroeck discusses the properties of the complementizer van ‘of’ in Brabant Dutch spoken in Belgium from a Kaynean point of view. The complementizer system of Danish relative clauses is discussed by Line Mikkelsen. She attempts to account for the status of complementizers from a more parsimonious view on phrase structure. The section on subordination is concluded by Susi Wurmbrand with an article on restructuring and control in Germanic.

The second section groups issues of movement and morphology. The first two articles present revisions of well-studied phenomena (adverb/object placement in English and verb-second in Scandinavian), exploiting the new insights on the process of collective movement. Roland Hinterhölzl argues for an analysis of the order of objects and adverbs in English that involves both VP-movement and covert object shift. Øystein Nilsen tackles the problem of violations of the verb-second constraint in Mainland Scandinavian involving focus particles. A more traditional approach to this topic is defended by Olaf Koeneman in his article on the distribution of declarative verb-second in the Germanic languages. He touches on the question of whether movement is determined by ‘richness’ of the morphology of the moved element. The two remaining contributors to this subpart doubt the existence of such an interconnection. Øystein Alexander Vangsnes emphasizes the parallel behavior of finite and nonfinite verbs in Mainland Scandinavian languages. Artemis Alexiadou and Gisbert Fanselow argue head on that a correlation between movement and morphological richness cannot be justified either conceptually or empirically, supporting their claim with ‘misleading’ historical tendencies.

The third section presents two articles on historical Germanic syntax. Eric Haeberli records in detail the loss of subject-verb inversion in English. Eric Hoekstra considers the question of how various feature-checking mechanisms develop in language contact situations.

The fourth and final section contains three contributions on the syntax-semantics interface from the perspective of Germanic. Jason Merchant’s article tracks the occurrence of swiping (sluicing involving prepositions, e.g. who with) across Germanic. Markus Steinbach argues for a unified analysis of middles and related constructions in English and German, focusing on the morphosyntactic properties of weak reflexive pronouns. Finally, Malte Zimmerman proposes a unified analysis of binominal each constructions in German and English. Useful subject and name indices conclude this collection of specialists’ observations that further thinking on comparative Germanic syntax.