Generalized verb movement: Aspects of verb syntax By Adriana Belletti (review)

836LANGUAGE, VOLUME 68, NUMBER 4 (1992) (1967:3). Schegloff is concerned with the connections participants make across utterances. This concern is built into CA transcripts, which offer many technical markings to represent key points in the sequencing of talk across persons, often to the disregard of received ways of marking phonological realities. The CA transcript makes a crucial point: talk and its interpretation depend on sequence and timing, on placement and context. The division between G and Schegloffis onjust how these can be shown to work in actual talk; in Schegloff's paper, G is shown not to deliver, whereas Schegloff does deliver. G would not have been amused, but he perhaps would have had to change his analysis of replies and responses. It is now easy to get agreement that context is crucial to any understanding of language. The new dividing line is between those who simply acknowledge it and those who find ways to use it systematically in their descriptions, between those who guess at the demands of context and those who can display its workings. G helped to identify this problem, and CA offers one way of moving beyond, from guesswork to display. Linguists still lag far behind. G is a good place to start catching up; his perspective is partial, but real and beautifully stated. Among those who guess at the fit between talk and context, he is unrivaled in ingenuity. Along with a companion volume from the same conference (Waksler 1989), Erving Goffman is the beginning of a corpus to help us continue learning from him. REFERENCES Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs: PrenticeHall . Goffman, Erving. 1967. Interaction ritual. New York: Anchor. -----. 1974. Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. New York: Harper. -----. 1976. Replies and responses. Language in Society 5.257-313. -----. 1981. Forms of talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Waksler, Frances (ed.) 1989. Erving Goffman's sociology. Human Studies 12.1-183. School of Education[Received 26 August 1991 ; Stanford Universityrevision received 8 May 1992.] Stanford, CA 94305 Generalized verb movement: Aspects of verb syntax. By Adriana Belletti. Torino, Italy: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1990. Pp. 151. Reviewed by Jean-Yves Pollock, Université de Haute Bretagne, Rennes II Generalized verb movement is the first book-length syntactic study conducted in the framework that has come to be known as the 'Split Inflection Hypothesis' (cf. Pollock 1989 and Chomsky 1989). Belletti makes revealing use of the syntactic distinction between Agr(P) and Tense(P) to shed light on (comparative ) French vs. Italian (ad)verb syntax in finite and nonfinite clauses (Ch. 1), and shows that analyzing absolute constructions in Italian as (a CP im- REVIEWS837 mediately dominating) an AGR(0)Phrase leads to principled explanations of their apparently bizarre properties (Ch. 2). The two chapters of the book contain interesting discussions of many very live issues on the current research agenda, e.g. simple and 'complex' (non...(più), ne...pas, etc.) negation in Italian and French, simple and complex tenses, Case, floating quantifiers, clitics, pre-Infl adverbs in simple sentences, unaccusatives, passive participles and transitive verbs, and Case on and Agreement with postverbal subjects in absolute constructions. Any linguist interested in the comparative syntax of Romance in general and Italian in particular will find it a valuable contribution, primarily, in my opinion, for its typology of Italian adverbs—which is based on the idea that Italian verbs always move to the topmost functional position in a clause—and for the demonstration that the intriguing properties of absolute constructions in Italian follow naturally from reasonable assumptions concerning their D-structure, on the one hand, and fairly well established properties of basic modules of UG on the other. I shall devote my comments mainly to Ch. 1, although the second chapter might well prove the more innovative and successful of the two. 1. On the Split Inflection Hypothesis. B's version of the Split Infi Hypothesis differs from that of Pollock 1989 in the order of embedding of Agr and Tense. My 1989 analysis led to S-structures that violate Baker's 1988 mirror principle; reversing the order yields a far more plausible morphological output, an obvious advantage, as independently pointed out by...