16.3500, Review: Linguistic Theories: di Sciullo (2005)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-3500. Thu Dec 08 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.3500, Review: Linguistic Theories: di Sciullo (2005)

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1)
Date: 06-Dec-2005
From: Luis Vicente < koldito at gmail.com >
Subject: UG and External Systems: Language, brain and computation 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Thu, 08 Dec 2005 18:04:31
From: Luis Vicente < koldito at gmail.com >
Subject: UG and External Systems: Language, brain and computation 
 

EDITOR: di Sciullo, Anna Maria 
TITLE: UG and External Systems
SUBTITLE: Language, Brain, and Computation
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins 
YEAR: 2005
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-1513.html 

Luis Vicente, LUCL, Leiden University

[We apologize to the reviewer, the editors of this volume and the 
publisher for our delay in posting this review. -- Eds.]

The stated goal ''UG and external systems'' is to advance our 
understanding of the nature of interfaces, i.e., how the requirements 
imposed by conceptual-intentional and sensory-motor systems have 
influenced the way UG is. To this end, di Sciullo has put together an 
eclectic collection of articles, which deal with a wide range of topics 
and subdisciplines of linguistics. There is, nonetheless, a common 
thread through them, as just mentioned: the exploration of the 
interfaces and their effect on the shape of human language. What is 
not so parallel amongst the articles, though, are the depth of the 
studies and the success of the hypotheses.

SUMMARY

The book consists of three parts (''Brain'', ''Language'', 
and ''Computation''), comprising a total of 18 articles. In what follows, 
we'll go briefly through them.

LANGUAGE

In ''Depictives: syntactic and semantic asymmetries'', Daniela Isac 
examines the differences between subject and object orientation of 
depictive secondary predicates. She claims that their asymmetries 
stem not only from their syntactic differences, but also from their 
different semantics. More specifically, she argues that object oriented 
depictives compose directly with the object they modify, whereas 
subject oriented depictives compose with an entire vP. This analysis 
recalls certain recent proposals about the different structures of 
ditransitive predicates (e.g., Pylkkänen 2002), although Isac doesn't 
mention this parallelism. Although a comparison between Isac's 
proposal and Pylkkänen's would certainly have been interesting, the 
article is still highly readable and puts forward a consistent and neat 
analysis.

The second chapter is Stanca Somesfalean's ''On two issues related 
to clitic clusters in Romance languages''. Here, Somesfalean argues 
against templatic analyses of clitic clusters, which had been proposed 
in the past largely due to some intra- and crosslinguistic idiosyncrasies 
that apparently couldn't be reduced to independent principles. 
However, in this rather data-heavy article, Somesfalean argues that 
the properties of clitic clusters are actually a reflection of the order of 
arguments in the clause.

In the third chapter (''On the question of (non)agreement in Russian 
imperatives''), Edit Jakab examines constructions in which an 
imperative verb form doesn't have an imperative meaning, but rather 
either a conditional or a contrastive reading. These two constructions 
are further characterized by the lack of agreement between the verb 
and the subject. His proposal is that the two anomalous imperatives 
lack the higher part of the functional layer, namely, TP and AgrSP, 
which accounts for the lack of agreement morphology.

Nicola Munaro's chapter (''Computational puzzles of conditional clause 
preposing'') starts by establishing the correlation that, in Italian 
dialects, whenever a conditional clause exhibits subject-verb 
inversion, it tends to precede the main clause. The analysis consists 
on positing that subject-verb inversion involves verb movement to the 
CP area, which activates the TopicP layer and defines the conditional 
clause as topical. As a consequence, the entire subordinate clause 
needs to move to a topic position in the main clause. Apart from this 
particular analysis, Munaro's paper is of interest in that it includes an 
exploration of the left periphery of Italian dialects couched in the 
cartographic approach.

In chapter five (''Clefts and tense asymmetries''), Manuela Ambar 
argues against the hypothesis that cleft sentences have a relative-like 
structure. On the basis mainly of Portuguese data, she recognises 
various types of clefts and argues that one determining factor 
distinguishing them is whether the tenses of the copula and the lexical 
verb have to be identical or not. She takes this requirement to be a 
point of parametric variation, which accounts for the crosslinguistic 
distribution of infl-less clefts and that-clefts.

This first part closes with Evan Mellander's paper ''Generating 
configurational asymmetries in prosodic phonology'', where he 
proposes an OT analysis of various types of crosslinguistic variation in 
the structure of feet and syllables. The crucial claim of the paper is 
that these asymmetries are reducible to a small set of rhythmic well-
formedness constraints.

BRAIN

In their paper ''Language learnability and the forms of recursion'', 
Willian Snyder and Tom Roeper argue that recursion is at the heart of 
linguistic competence. They support this claim through a case study 
on endocentric root compounding in various languages (French, 
English, and Swedish), where they claim that various types of 
recursion are possible, and the language learner's task is to 
determine which ones are available in their language. A number of 
crosslinguistic differences are derived from this hypothesis.

In ''The autonomous contribution of syntax and pragmatics to the 
acquisition of the Hebrew definite article'', Sharon Armon-Loten and 
Idit Avram argue that pragmatics and world knowledge are important 
factors in the acquisition of the distribution of definite articles in 
Hebrew and English. On the basis of these data, they claim the 
pragmatic concept of shared knowledge doesn't arise until age four or 
so, accounting for some earlier-age errors in the use of articles.

Chapter nine is Helen Goodluck's ''D-linking and question formation: 
comprehension effects in children and aphasics''. She shows that 
there is a subject/object asymmetry in the comprehension of d-linked 
questions by children and aphasic, in that object questions are harder 
to parse than subject question. However, this contrast is absent in 
non-d-linked questions. She suggests that the asymmetry in d-linked 
questions can be traced back, at least partially, to perceptual factors 
in the set-up of the experiment.

In chapter ten (''Evidence from ASL and ÖGS for asymmetries in UG''), 
Ronnie Wilbur shows that both American and Austrian Sign 
Languages provide evidence for the existence of structural 
asymmetries in UG. He considers the behaviour of the verb with 
respect to various elements like negation or stage/individual level 
predicates; the clause structure of ASL and ÖSG, in particular the 
directionality of various projections; and the scope of wh- elements, as 
indicated by non-manual gestures like brow furrowing. The take-home 
message here is that languages, whether spoken or signed, are 
inherently asymmetric.

Ning Pan and William Snyder (''Acquisition of phonological empty 
categories: a case study of early child Dutch'') examine the order in 
which Dutch children acquire different syllable types. On the basis of a 
reexamination of available CHILDES data, they conclude that CV is 
the first syllable type to be acquired, followed by a group formed by 
CVC, V, and VC (contra Levelt, Schiller & Levelt 2000, who claimed 
that the latter three were acquired at different stages). Pang and 
Snyder account for this pattern in terms of Government Phonology, by 
postulating two parameters [+/- empty onset] and [+/- empty nucleus]. 
This analysis thus lends support to the onset-nucleus theory of the 
syllable, as opposed to the onset-nucleus-coda one.

The ''Brain'' section finishes with Matt Bauer's article ''Prosodic clues 
during online processing on speech''. In this paper, Bauer tries to 
determine whether hearers make use of prosody as an aid to parse 
the syntactic structure of the incoming string. The data come from two 
case studies on stress shift in American English. However, the results 
are negative, and the conclusion is that prosody doesn't seem to 
provide a cue as to what the syntactic structure of the clause in 
question is, although, Bauer adds a caveat that this result might be 
related to a flaw in the design of the experiment.

COMPUTATION

Chapter thirteen is Annamaria di Sciullo & Sandiway 
Fong's ''Morphosyntactic parsing'', in which they develop a parser 
based on di Sciullo's (1996) own theory of morphological selection. 
The main idea is that lexical properties of derivational affixes are not 
lexically encoded, but are rather defined in terms of asymmetric 
structural relations, from which premise they derive various properties 
of affixation. 

Next is Sourabh Niyogi & Robert Berwick's paper ''A minimalist 
implementation of Hale & Keyser incorporation theory''. On the basis 
of Hale & Keyser's well-known work on incorporation, they develop a 
parser that covers most of Levin's (1995) English verb classes. In the 
same way as Hale & Keyser's theory, Niyogi & Berwick's analysis has 
the added advantage of replacing theta roles (qua specifications in 
the lexical entries of verbs) with specific structural configurations.

Following up with the morphology theme, Henk Harkema (''Minimalist 
languages and the correct prefix property'') develops a top-down 
parser with the ''correct prefix property'', namely, one in which, given 
an ungrammatical sentence, parsing is stopped on the first word that 
doesn't fit the structure. The entire system is based on the basic 
operations Merge and Move.

In ''Computation with probes and goals'', Sandiway Fong presents a 
parser that implements the operations Merge, Move, and Agree. 
These operations are redefined so that they can be applied in a top-
down parser. Although the paper gives a thorough overview of how 
these operations are to be implemented, it fails to address how they 
compare to their counterparts in bottom-up structure building.

Rodolfo Delmonte (''Deep and shallow linguistically based parsing: 
parametrising ambiguity in a hybrid parser'') develops a theory of 
processing that reconciles symbolic and statistical approaches. His 
idea is that parsing should be based on grammar, not on statistical 
methods. However, statistical considerations can apply whenever 
lexical information introduces an ambiguity whose resolution requires 
non-grammatical knowledge.

The final article of the book is Philippe Blanche's ''Towards a 
quantitative theory of variability''. He proposes an ''extended interface'' 
of sorts, in which information coming from various linguistic 
components (prosody, syntax, semantics...) adds up to the 
communicative act. This enables him to account for variability in a 
number of constructions, the choice between alternatives depending 
on whether a certain ''equilibrium threshold'' is reached or not.

EVALUATION

As I mentioned at the beginning of this review, this book is a rather 
eclectic collection of papers, both in contents -- as can easily be seen 
from the above paragraphs -- and in quality. While some of the papers 
(e.g., Pan & Snyder's comes to mind) are important contributions to 
the understanding of the topic they deal with, others are not so much. 

I must also say that I found the subtitle of the book (''Language, brain, 
and computation'') a bit misleading. I was expecting a collection of 
interdisciplinary articles, in which language, brain, and computation 
issues were discussed in relation to each other. However, what I 
found is that these three categories are kept rather apart. That is, one 
finds articles about linguistic theory, about ''brain'', and about 
computation, but the three topics do not intermingle in individual 
articles. The ''brain'' label is also a bit obscure for me, since it makes it 
sound as though you were in for a set of papers on 
neuro/psycholinguistics. Instead, most papers in this section deal with 
acquisition, and only a couple of them with comprehension. 

Now, all this doesn't mean this is a bad book. I enjoyed reading most 
of the articles, including the ones dealing with topics I am not familiar 
with. In this sense, it is a valuable and interesting book. My only 
complaint is that it didn't deliver what it advertised, not that the content 
is not worth the effort of reading through it. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

I am a fourth year PhD student, specialising in formal syntax. In the 
past I have worked on relativisation, reconstruction, head movement, 
remnant movement, the syntax-phonology interface, coordination, the 
structure of VP, and argument licensing. Currently I am writing a 
dissertation on A-movement and agreement





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