Topics in South Slavic Syntax and Semantics (review)

This volume grew out of the Formal Approaches to South Slavic Languages (FASSL) (later called Formal Approaches to South Slavic and Balkan Languages) biennial conference series initiated in Bulgaria in 1995. Most papers in this collection are revised versions of talks from FASSL 1 or 2, the 1995 and 1997 meetings. Like FASSL itself, this book brings together work by East European and western scholars on South Slavic languages within a formal (i.e. more or less minimalist, in most cases) framework.

The collection is lopsidedly concentrated on Bulgarian syntax. Of its eleven papers, six focus on Bulgarian, two on Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian, one on all the South Slavic languages, and two (in spite of the title) on languages which are not South Slavic. Nine papers deal with syntactic issues; two with semantics. Subject, name, and language indexes complete the volume.

The editors’ ‘Introduction’ is actually an independent paper, presenting their idiosyncratic view of Bulgarian clause structure as consisting of four ‘fields’ labelled ‘FRONT’, ‘Pron Clitics’, ‘Functional’, and ‘VP’. A brief comparison with Macedonian and Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian suggests that parts of the analysis, though not all details, extend to these other South Slavic languages. This chapter purports to serve as background for the other papers in the volume; however, none of the other papers adopt or even mention anything like the clause structure suggested, except the one paper of which Dimitrova-Vulchanova herself is a coauthor.

The papers vary in quality, but most are interesting and well-written. All are by well-known experts in the area. María Luisa Rivero argues that V can raise ‘to satisfy requirements of a variety of Associates’ (1), allowing her to maintain her analysis of participle fronting in Bulgarian and various other languages as long head movement. Ljiljana Progovac compares repeated-conjunction constructions in Serbo-Croatian and English, attributing many aspects of their behavior to an economy principle, ‘Economize with Conjunctions’, and ultimately to a universal principle, ‘Minimize Overtness’. Ivanka Petkova Schick compares Bulgarian adversatives with those of Russian, Romanian, and German, showing that these languages differ in how their adversative conjunctions divide up the semantic space. Iliyana Krapova, in one of the best papers of the volume, differentiates several classes of Bulgarian auxiliaries, attributing their behavior to differing values of three features: [±lexical], [±affixal] and [±aux].

Andrew Caink, in another excellent paper, argues against treating ‘participle fronting’ in Bulgarian as long head movement and in favor of an account in terms of PF insertion of certain auxiliaries. Henk Verkuyl sketches a unified description of aspectuality in Germanic, Romance, and Slavic from a formal semantic, set theoretical point of view; this paper does include a few Bulgarian examples, but its focus is not primarily South Slavic. Mila Dimitrova-Vulchanova and Giuliana Giusti analyze four different possessor constructions within the Bulgarian DP, showing syntactic and semantic distinctions among them. Wayles Browne, in a modest little gem of an article, demonstrates that the ‘simplest’ sentences in lesson 1 of any South Slavic language textbook (What is this? That is a ___.) raise numerous thorny theoretical issues involving clitics, demonstratives, lack of expected gender/number agreement, subjecthood, case, placement of wh-phrases, and more. This is the only article in the volume which deals extensively with several South Slavic languages.

Jindrich Toman argues for a nonmovement analysis of Czech clitics, claiming that they spell out strong features in the extended verbal projection. This is a well-reasoned, interesting article, but it doesn’t mention South Slavic—rather oddly, since South Slavic languages have very similar clitics which could easily have been included in the analysis. Finally, Nedzad Leko argues for a DP with structure [DP [PossP [NumP[ DefP[AgrP [NP ]]]]]] in Bosnian, based on the behavior of several types...