Specifiers: Minimalist Approaches (review)

This collection of papers examines the notion of specifiers in light of the minimalist program. Each chapter is a revised version of a paper originally presented at a conference held at the University of York in March 1996. From the descriptive point of view, the notion of specifiers unifies a wide variety of constructions, including subjects, possessors, determiners, auxiliaries, adverbs, and attributive adjectives. From the theoretical point of view, the notion of specifiers underlies two most important components in minimalist research: phrase structure and feature checking theories. One of the central issues is whether the projection of specifiers is to be extended, restricted, or eliminated altogether. These papers contribute to this debate.

The volume opens with a very useful introductory chapter by the editors. In this chapter, they present a brief overview of the minimalist program as well as a summary of the contributions by the articles in the volume. The rest of the book is divided into three parts. The papers in the first part examine some general issues regarding the nature of the specifier position. Ronnie Cann (‘Specifiers as secondary heads’) proposes that specifiers act much like heads in that they project features. His analysis is aimed at accounting for properties of passive and past participles and for perfective and causative auxiliaries. Annabel Cormack (‘Without specifiers’) takes the further step of eliminating specifiers altogether. She examines a number of structures where specifiers have been proposed and argues that in each case the specifier can be thought of as one of the arguments of a sometimes covert two place operator. Edit Doron and Caroline Heycock (‘Filling and licensing multiple specifiers’) take the opposite view, arguing that a system that allows for multiple specifiers provides an elegant account of otherwise problematic constructions— the so-called multiple-subject constructions in Japanese and some Semitic languages.

The second part of the volume is concerned with the theory of specifier projection, movement into specifier positions, and feature checking. Papers include ‘EPP without Spec, IP’ by ArtemisAlexiadou and Elena Anagnostopoulou, ‘Spec-head agreement and overt case in Arabic’ by Elabbas Benmamoun, ‘Adjectival modifiers and the specifier-adjunct distinction’ by Nigel Duffield, ‘The additional wh-effect and multiple wh-fronting’ by Günther Grewendorf, ‘Parallels between nominal and verbal projections’ by Teun Hoekstra, ‘Dependencies, phrase structure, and extractions’ by M. Rita Manzini, ‘Movement to specifiers’ by Lynn Nichols, and ‘Wh-movement, licensing, and the locality of feature checking’ by Andrew Simpson.

Papers in Part 3 examine the first and second language acquisition of specifiers. They include ‘The role of the specifier and the finiteness in early grammar’ by Teun Hoekstra, Nina Hyams, and Misha Becker; ‘The acquisition of verb movement and Spec-head relationships in child Swedish’ by Lynn Santelmann; and ‘Some specs on Specs in L2 acquisition’ by Bonnie D. Schwartz.

This volume makes a significant contribution to the study of specifiers drawing on empirical studies of crosslinguistic phenomena, conceptual and theoretical argumentation, and results from language acquisition.