Towards a biolinguistic understanding of grammar: Essays on interfaces ed. by Anna Maria Di Sciullo (review)

This collection of essays is a timely and important contribution to the field of biolinguistics, the study of the biology of language. The book provides an interdisciplinary look at language research in the areas central to biological inquiry: form and function, development, and evolution. Questions about the relative influence on the language faculty of genetic endowment, experience, and external factors are investigated. Anna Maria Di Sciullo has chosen as the unifying theme for the book the study of the interfaces mediating between the computational system of syntax/lexicon and the systems for sound and meaning.

In ‘Single cycle syntax and a constraint on quantifier lowering’, Howard Lasnik revisits an old problem, why the sentence Nobody is (absolutely) certain to pass the test cannot be paraphrased by It is (absolutely) certain that nobody will pass the test. This is one example of many where negation and certain quantifiers fail to have a ‘lowered reading’. At the same time, indefinites do allow such readings. In order to reconcile these facts, Lasnik evaluates a number of alternative proposals, before settling on an interesting solution that uses a particular formulation of the abstract notion of a syntactic cycle (‘single cycle syntax’) to constrain the operation of scope and movement.

In ‘A constraint on remnant movement’, Tim Hunter explores what for many decades has been a rich mine for investigating the structure of the language faculty, viz. constraints on syntactic movement. Here he reviews data on the phenomenon of ‘remnant movement’, where a sub-constituent such as an NP is moved out of a larger constituent, such as a verb phrase, after which the larger phrase is moved. This is illustrated by the German sentence Gelesen hat das Buch keiner ‘No one read the book’ where the noun phrase das Buch ‘book’ is extracted from the verb phrase, leaving behind the ‘remnant’ verb phrase containing only the verb gelesen ‘read’, which is then fronted. Hunter formulates a locality constraint on remnant movement (the ‘just outside constraint’), which has interesting implications for word order (SVO, SOV, VSO, verb-second).

In ‘Language and conceptual reanalysis’, Paul M. Pietroski takes up the question of the role of semantic computations for human language, from a biolinguistic perspective in general, and in the ‘spirit’ of the minimalist program. In particular, he investigates the core notion of semantic composition and examines a number of traditional (e.g. Frege-Tarski) and modern (e.g. neo-Davidsonian) approaches. For Pietroski meanings are instructions for building concepts so the computations for semantic composition include accessing concepts via lexical items and conceptual composition. He examines a wide range of linguistic constructions, developing analyses that have bio-logical (rather than merely logical) plausibility. In one place, he even pointedly states that ‘biochemistry can create concepts’ (80). This recalls Noam Chomsky’s observation that linguistic universals are principles based on biological, not logical, necessity.

In ‘Decomposing force’, Daniela Isac examines the semantics of imperative clauses. Traditionally, a syntactic Force feature had been proposed to distinguish declarative, interrogative, exclamative, and imperative clauses. Isac undertakes a cross-language comparison of the syntactic and semantic properties of imperative clauses (for which she assembles a number of useful diagnostic tests) to make the case that imperative force can be better understood if the Force feature is derived from two features: modality and second person. In support of her analysis, she presents an interesting discussion of the properties of root and nonroot modals to account for the fact that imperatives pattern with nonroot modals. Isac notes that this analysis may possibly extend to other clauses types—for example, exclamatives and interrogatives—but leaves this open for future research.

In ‘Function without content: Evidence from Greek subjunctive na’, Christiana Christodoulou and Martina Wiltschko provide evidence that in certain cases the function of functional categories (such as INFL) can be...