Rightward movement in a comparative perspective ed. by Gert Webelhuth, Manfred Sailer, and Heike Walker (review)

Rightward movement in a comparative perspective is a useful and wide-ranging collection of papers on constructions that patently display rightward movement, though one of the major issues that arises in discussion of such cases, and no less so in this book, is whether they involve ‘movement’ at all. Indeed, when syntacticians speak of rightward movement they speak metaphorically, since even syntacticians who believe in literal movement do not believe that all nonadjacent dependent relations from the right must involve movement. In fact, at least some rightward movement configurations are generally agreed not to involve movement of a dislocated and rightward-positioned dependent phrase at all (e.g. English relative clause extraposition).

It is fitting that this title appears in John Benjamins’s ‘Linguistik aktuell/Linguistics today’ series, following on from Rightward movement (Beermann, LeBlanc, & van Riemsdijk 1997). The present volume’s perspective is comparative in several ways: theoretical (different frameworks), empirical (different types of data: corpus-based, experimental, reported grammaticality judgments), and crosslinguistic (different languages and language families). In addition, the chapters overall compare different motivational sources for rightward movement (processing/parsing, syntax, prosodic phonology, or some combination thereof). The book is enhanced by a comprehensive and compelling introduction by the editors that makes a contribution to the study of right-ward movement configurations in its own right. This introduction gives an overview of the analytical challenges that characterize rightward movement configurations in general and relative clause extraposition in particular, and critically surveys existing proposals, including those to be found in the papers that follow in the book. Among the descriptive and explanatory issues that arise are: (i) construal (how does the rightward-positioned dependent constituent recover those aspects of its interpretation that are dependent on a leftward-situated nonadjacent position or host?); (ii) locality/boundedness (what is the source of the varying boundedness effects that govern the relation between the rightward-positioned dependent phrase and its dependent host position, and why do these differ across constructions?); (iii) whether a uniform account of (subsets of) rightward movement configurations is at all possible; (iv) why it is just the constructions so labeled that appear to involve a specifically rightward dependency relation; (v) why rightward-oriented dependency relations are mandatory in some cases and optional in others (e.g. relative clause extraposition is generally optional, whereas comparative and result clause extraposition or German verbal-complement finite clause extraposition is not); and (vi) what the division of labor is between processing, prosody, and syntax in providing for the specific properties of and motivations for rightward movement configurations of different types. The chapters in this book, including the introduction, together address all of these questions in one form or another, bringing new evidence and perspectives to bear on the issues from comparative, analytical, and psycholinguistic domains of investigation. The editors have conveniently organized the contributions into four sections: empirical, minimalist, other theoretical, and prosodic perspectives. Let us review each in turn.

Part 1, ‘Empirical perspective’, begins with two papers exploring the interaction of parsing/ processing effects with syntactic constraints, indicating gradient effects of the latter that are arguably due to considerations of the former. ‘Constraints on intra- and extraposition’, by Markus Bader, Jana Häusler, and Tanja Schmid, presents a study of the acceptability of extraposition of infinitival complements, of modal and of control verbs, to the German Nachfeld: modal verbs demand extraposition of an infinitival complement, while control verbs allow more variability, often easily permitting ‘intraposition’. After careful study of the theoretical literature, and noting the relevance of verb-cluster formation in particular, the authors investigate the issues using both corpus studies and grammaticality-judgment experiments. While modal verbs participate in verbcluster formation whenever possible, control verbs vary in the ease with which they participate in this operation and are therefore more susceptible to the weight considerations that are often associated with parsing...