In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Derivations: Exploring the dynamics of syntax by Juan Uriagereka
  • Phoevos Panagiotidis
Derivations: Exploring the dynamics of syntax. By Juan Uriagereka. (Routledge leading linguists 9.) London: Routledge, 2002. Pp. 366. ISBN 0415247764. $100 (Hb.)

This book is a collection of previously published work by Uriagereka, and roughly half of the chapters in it are co-authored. Following a well-rounded introduction, Ch. 2, ‘Conceptual matters’, brings together a review of Noam Chomsky’s The minimalist program (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995) and a reply from U in a recent debate on minimalism. The rest of the book consists of two parts: ‘Syntagmatic issues’ (comprising Chs. 3–8) and ‘Paradigmatic issues’ (Chs. 9–15).

The problematics of ‘Syntagmatic issues’ revolves around the issue of choosing between a representational and a (more) derivational model of syntax, with U (and his co-authors) clearly opting for a pure version of the latter and providing elaborate argumentation and refinements for it. Ch. 3 introduces the influential idea of multiple spell-out. Ch. 4, with Jairo Nunes, combines multiple spell-out and Nunes’s sideward movement to capture restrictions on extraction out of islands. Ch. 5 fleshes out the essentials of a minimalist account of islands in Basque. In Ch. 6, the author, jointly with Norbert Hornstein, resolves an apparent mismatch between the position of quantifiers in the syntactic tree and their scope in semantic structures by appealing to the (syntactic) mechanism of reprojection. Ch. 7, with Juan Carlos Castillo, introduces and expounds ‘tucking in’, [End Page 1027] which is the proposed ability of Move to violate the extension condition and ‘insert’ the moved object ‘inside’ the tree, rather than extending the phrase marker. Ch. 8 assumes a broader view over minimalism to examine general architectural characteristics of grammar.

Part 2, ‘Paradigmatic concerns’, opens with Chs. 9 (with Norbert Hornstein and Sara Rosen) and 10, both of which deal with the relation between ‘be’ and ‘have’—the latter conceived as abstractly consisting of ‘be’ plus a preposition; the notion of possession inevitably enters the discussion. Ch. 11, with Eduardo Raposo, offers an account of the difference between individual-level and stage-level predicates in terms of the interaction between syntax and LF. Ch. 12 explores proper names and their properties, as well as how they are syntactically derived. In Ch. 13, with Esther Torrego, two kinds of sentential complements are explored and analyzed. The final two chapters, 14 (with Paul Pietroski) and 15, again step back from individual phenomena to consider the architecture of grammar and offer some meditations on it.

Although some might find that in places very interesting proposals are put forward but not always adequately motivated, the book is very interesting in that it consistently pursues the goal of developing a theory of syntax where all relations are consequences of derivational history: that is, the type and number of constituent-building mechanisms that have so far applied in a derivation. Moreover, this is done quite aptly and appealingly, in the cases of multiple spell-out or the redefining of cyclicity, for instance.

Phoevos Panagiotidis
Cyprus College
...

pdf

Share