Slavic in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (review)

Recent years have shown a rapid splash of activity in the frames of formal approaches to Slavic languages. Head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG), like most other theories of natural language, was initially developed largely on the basis of English. A few studies applying this type of grammar to quite different types of languages began to appear in the 1980s; works published in the 1990s show that distinctive word order and morphological properties of Slavic languages can be quite a challenge for structural analysis. The present volume, which examines a variety of phenomena from Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Russian, Bulgarian, and Czech, is a welcome addition to the field; its contributors try to provide an explicit framework for grammatical description, supported by experimental research.

Traditionally, the majority of work within any formal approach to language has been concerned with syntax. This volume is not an exception. Tania Avgustinova, Wojciech Skut, and Hans Uszkoreit examine diathesis phenomena in a range of Slavic languages. They argue that HPSG is capable of coping with crosslinguistic similarities. As a result, a formal cross-Slavic account of valency alternations is proposed. Małgorzata Marciniak aims at formulating an HPSG binding theory for Polish. In this respect she discusses middle-distance binding. She seeks to provide a comprehensive account of this phenomenon and concentrates on the formalization of Principles A and B of the binding theory. Adam Przepiórkowski examines the nature of the complement-adjunct distinction. He shows that alleged configurational tests are at odds with linguists’ views on this dichotomy and argues that his result adds weight to recent HPSG approaches to it.

Syntax is not the only matter of concern in the presented works. The editors of the volume seem to have found a proper balance in the discussion. The majority of contributors look into less frequently studied topics within HPSG and try to go beyond pure syntax, dealing with important problems in phonological, syntactico-morphological, and complex syntactico-semantic interface.

In this respect, Tilman N. Höhle proposes a model for phonology. He suggests that the relations between phonology and physical phonetics can be more precisely understood from the HPSG point of view, supporting his statement with data from Russian, German, and Miwok. Gerald Penn is interested in the interaction of syntactic, prosodic, and discourse effects. He argues for a more basic reform to HPSG’s notion of constituency. Robert D. Borsley discusses weak auxiliaries, certain complex verb forms, and certain complementizers in Polish. He suggests that HPSG and, in particular, certain recent proposals within the framework, allow a more satisfactory analysis of these data. Stephen Wechsler and Larisa Zlatić state that in certain contexts involving dative and instrumental cases in Serbo-Croatian, case must be morphologically realized; as a result some special undeclined nouns cannot be used. Anna Kupść deals with the status of the Polish reflexive marker ‘self’, showing its linear realization in terms of the order domains approach. Frank Richter and Manfred Sailer discuss negative concord (NC) in Polish. Understanding n-words as identifiers, rather than quantifiers, they talk of the distribution of n-words in terms of their theory of collocations. Adam Przepiórkowsky and Anna Kupść also argue that NC is subject to both syntactic and semantic island constraints and show that Italian data confirm this result.

All the papers demonstrate a thorough and accurate approach to the studied topics and provide a very interesting outline of phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic issues found in the Slavic languages. No doubt, the volume will be found most interesting as a guide and an inspiration for further research in the HPSG framework.