Current issues in comparative grammar ed. by Robert Freidin (review)

620LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 3 (1998) proach, in this sense, seems to be on the right track and is indeed a valuable first step to delimit possible nonsubject antecedents. REFERENCES Gunji, Takao. 1987. Japanese phrase structure grammar. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. Pollard, Carl J., and Ivan A. Sag. 1994. Head-driven phrase structure grammar. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Faculty of Language and Culture Osaka University 1-8 Machikaneyama-cho Toyonaka Osaka 560, Japan [gunji@lisa.lang.osaka-u.ac.jp] Current issues in comparative grammar. Ed. by Robert Freidin. Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996. Pp. xi, 382. Reviewed by Mary Laughren, The University of Queensland Current issues in comparative grammar is built around nine core articles by Luigi Burzio, A. Carlos Quicoli, Esther Torrego, Jaklin Kornfilt, Howard Lasnik, Margaret A. Browning, Guglielmo Cinque, Juan Uriagereka, Joseph Aoun and Yen-Hui Audrey Li, to which are added six commentary papers each addressed to a particular article and two short response papers. In a short introduction, Freidin briefly summarizes the contributions. First presented in 1989 at the Second Princeton Workshop on Comparative Grammar, mey have been revised for publication, the authors relating their original analyses to relevant theoretical developments reported in more recent literature. The structure ofthis volume, in which arguments are advanced, critically reviewed, and in two cases defended, enhances its pedagogic value. Because most authors have constructed their arguments around a solid body of well-chosen data, producing some extremely elegant papers, this volume has much to offer the student of syntax. The theoretical perspective of all contributions is essentially that of the Principles and Parameters framework emerging from Chomsky's 1981 Government and Binding and 1986 Barriers frameworks. There is a foretaste of Optimality approaches in Burzio's theory of intrasentential coreference. As the volume's title suggests, the contributors compare and contrast data from an interesting, if not extensive, range of languages. Four of the nine main papers draw principally on Romance languages: French (Torrego), Galician (or Galegan) (Uriagereka), Italian (Cinque, Torrego), Portuguese (Quicoli), and Spanish (Quicoli, Torrego). Romance language data is also analyzed by Burzio, Browning, and Lasnik in their cross-linguistic studies. Kornfilt's analysis of Turkish infinitival double passive constructions and Aoun and Li's paper on speaker variation in the interpretation of pronominal reference in Chinese (Mandarin) are the only ones principally focussed on non-Indo-European data. The concentration on IE languages, and on Romance languages in particular, is a strength, rather than a weakness of this volume. Each contribution relates new data to the more familiar and offers fresh insights through clearly laid out analyses built on the substantial foundations of previous work, thus providing models for the investigation of less well studied and understood languages. For example, Quicoli's ('Inflection and parametric variation: Portuguese vs. Spanish', 46-80) comparison of Portuguese inflected infinitival clauses with Portuguese and Spanish uninflected infinitival clauses shows that the inflected infinitival clauses behave like inflected finite clauses in which nominative case is assigned to the subject whether overt or nonovert. Quicoli argues convincingly that the nonovert subject of both finite and inflected infinitival clauses is nominative case-marked smallpro, while the obligatorily non-overt subject ofuninflected infinitival clauses is ungoverned and hence caseless big PRO. Since nominative case is never assigned REVIEWS621 to the subject of an uninflected infinitival clause, an overt subject must either be marked by a lexical case or by a structural case assigned by an element of the matrix (higher) clause. This contrast has a parallel in Australian languages. In the uninflected (for tense or agreement) infinitival clauses of Warlpiri and other closely related languages, nominative case cannot be assigned (to either the subject of an intransitive verb or to the object of a transitive verb). By contrast, in the neighboring, but more distantly related, Wati and Arandic languages, subordinate clauses lacking any agreement inflection maintain a restricted set of tense inflections which suffice for the assignment of nominative case within these AGR-less subordinate clauses. These facts seem to indicate that nominative case assignment depends on the presence of some inherent inflectional features, which ones varying from language to language. Kenneth Safir ('PRO and pro: Comments on Quicoli...