Boundaries of Morphology and Syntax (review)

This book contains fifteen articles originally presented at the colloquium ‘The Boundaries of Morphology and Syntax’ in 1997, followed by a general index and preceded by an introduction by the editor summarizing the content of the articles and offering a quick overview of the main issues developed in later years in this area of research.

In the ‘Introduction’, Lunella Mereu explicitly says that ‘[t]his volume is specifically focused on the interface between morphology and syntax, although as we will soon see, the morpho-syntax-pragmatics and the morpho-syntax-semantic interfaces will be considered too’ (1). She divides the volume correspondingly into three sections: ‘Morphological phenomena and their boundaries’, ‘Morpho-syntax and pragmatics’, and ‘Morpho-syntax and semantics’. However, no explicit mention of something like a morphosyntactic component, whatever it would mean, appears in any of the articles in the book, not even in the general index. It seems thus that the editor adopts uncritically a traditional concept—‘morphosyntax as grammar’—for justifying the inclusion of purely syntactically concerned articles (take for instance the articles by Elisabet Engdahl, Mara Frascarelli, Katalin Kiss, and Rossana Sornicola). Even worse, leaving aside the first section, little attention is paid to morphology in the book unless we take morphology as anything dealing loosely with an element carrying inflection. A paradigmatic example is Rossana Sornicola’s contribution, which appears under the section ‘Morpho-syntax and semantics’ even though it has not even a remote connection to morphology or semantics altogether.

As for the content, the book covers crucial phenomena occurring at the interfaces such as the place of inflectional morphology (Paola Benincà), compounding (Antonietta Bissetto and Sergio Scalise), and noun incorporation (Marianne Mithun and Greville G. Corbett, Marco Svolacchia and Annarita Puglielli), the process of grammaticalization/lexicalization (Johan van der Auwera, Maria Załeska, and Claire Blanche-Benveniste), the polysynthesis parameter (Marco Svolacchia and Annarita Puglielli), or the syntax of focus (Elisabet Engdahl, Mara Frascarelli, Katalin Kiss, Lunella Mereu). However, surprisingly, it pays almostno attention to cliticization, a typical phenomenon of the morphology-syntax interface, which becomes even more astonishing when one considers that the best represented languages (Italian with six papers, and Somali with three papers) show a rich pronominal clitic system.

Regarding the intrinsic content of the volume, the contributions are tied to acceptable standards although some irregularity is found—an inescapable upshot in any collective volume, especially when incorporating the results of a colloquium. Nonetheless, the main shortcoming of the volume lies in its unrestricted heterogeneity, for there is hardly any cross-reference between the papers, and contradictory treatments of similar phenomena coexist without any critical assessment (compare for instance Elisabet Engdahl’s treatment of focus with that of Mara Frascarelli or Katalin Kiss). Therefore, taken as a whole, this volume leaves the reader with the uneasy sensation that rather than offering an overview of the intricate phenomena and relationships occurring at the interface components, it constitutes a piece of linguistic patchwork where everything is admitted provided a tiny relation with morphology or syntax can be adduced, and where little exchange of ideas can be found.