30.90, Review: Slavic Subgroup; Morphology; Phonology; Syntax: Franks (2017)
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LINGUIST List: Vol-30-90. Tue Jan 08 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.
Subject: 30.90, Review: Slavic Subgroup; Morphology; Phonology; Syntax: Franks (2017)
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Date: Tue, 08 Jan 2019 15:48:26
From: Eugenia Romanova [evgeniya.romanova at icloud.com]
Subject: Syntax and Spell-Out in Slavic
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/28/28-4430.html
AUTHOR: Steven Franks
TITLE: Syntax and Spell-Out in Slavic
PUBLISHER: Slavica Publishers
YEAR: 2017
REVIEWER: Eugenia Romanova, Institute of Philosophy and Law, Ural Branch of RAS
“Grammatical knowledge is digital, not analog” (p. 4).
SUMMARY
“Syntax and Spell-Out in Slavic” consists of five chapters dedicated to
different problems of South Slavic syntax and the syntax-phonology interface.
The chapters are united by the common subject matter and to some extent the
analytical tools outlined in the first half of the book, where the author
elaborates on a complex system of minimalist-like syntax and its connection to
spell-out. The second part largely deals with the South Slavic clitics.
Let us have a close look at the organization of the work and the contents of
the chapters. Each chapter (apart from Chapter 1 with the background
information) raises a particular problem or set of problems and delves into
their analysis.
Chapter 1, Features and Vocabulary Insertion, discusses the basic notions of
Distributed Morphology (DM), argument structure and feature checking. Here
Steven Franks also introduces his view of the functional hierarchy: the
presence or absence of certain projections in the functional sequence of a
syntactic tree. He revives Agreement Phrase (AgrP) for some languages and
assumes a “distinct (K)ase Phrase, the K0 of which is typically instantiated
as a pronominal clitic” (p. 29). An important role here is played by the
Subset Principle of Halle (1997) cited on pp. 11 and 118, according to which
both a syntactic position designated for a particular lexical item and the
lexical item (LI) to be inserted in that position have to share a certain
number of features, and the “item matching the greatest number of features
specified in the terminal morpheme must be chosen”.
Chapter 2, Movement and Multiattachment, offers the author’s original vision
of syntactic derivation and its connection to the other linguistic levels,
particularly, phonetic form (PF). Movement is viewed here through the metaphor
of multiattachment, which should not be confused with representational
analyses. The author repeats more than once that he adopts “a highly
derivational perspective” (p. 84). The essence of Frank’s approach is in probe
and goal relationship, in which one probe can have a connection with multiple
goals through identical morphosyntactic features. To achieve this, the notion
of address is postulated. It is borrowed from Grohmann 2003 and adapted from
Franks and Herring 2011. Roughly speaking, an address corresponds to an old
Government and Binding idea of an index (pp. 48-49). “All pieces of structure…
have an address. …Vocabulary items and higher phrases” are ““pointers”. …What
Merge does is assign a unique new address A which points to the addresses of
the syntactic objects being concatenated. …Address A is multiply invoked, once
at the initial merge site and again at the remerge site” (p. 49). The theory
is best demonstrated and corroborated by the data of interrogative sentences.
It is richly illustrated by tree diagrams with multiple arrows indicating the
multiattachment relations between different nodes.
The derivation proceeds in three steps, the details of which are clearly
stated in the chapter. Step I is a general search induced by features on the
probe for the unvalued features on the goals and establishing “the featural
link” between them in syntax. Step II is “a precursor to eventual movement”.
This operation is laden with constraints and is responsible for, e.g., island
effects. Step III is actual movement here understood as “multiattachment to
the root of the tree” (p. 54).
Chapter 3, Pronunciation and Mapping to PF, deals with Spell-Out, connected
with prosodic properties of different chunks of syntactic structure. Here the
author discusses processes of delinking, that is, “those in which, as part of
the mapping to PF, a link to phonetic content is severed. …If pronunciation
involves accessing the information located at some address B and pointed to by
some higher address A, then failure to pronounce implies the removal of that
pointer or, in terms of my diagrams, deletion of that link” (pp. 99-100). The
point is developed mostly against the ellipsis data. Another piece of data
convincingly supporting the idea is provided from Polish where one relative
pronoun can seemingly be simultaneously genitive and dative (p. 116) (I should
add that similar data can also be found in Russian). Another important topic
of this chapter is linearization in the style of the Linear Correspondence
Axiom (LCA) by Kayne (1994): it explains certain island effects.
In Chapter 4, the author closely addresses the problematics of South Slavic
clitics. He considers the phenomenon of splitting (when clitics interfere with
a syntactic constituent) and discusses three mechanisms of splitting: a) PF
deletion; b) Remnant Movement; c) Left Branch Extraction. He shows that in
different languages different mechanisms could be at work, which is justified
by various typologies characterizing South Slavic languages. For example,
Bulgarian and Macedonian are Determiner Phrase (DP) languages according to
Bošković (2005), whereas the rest are Noun Phrase (NP) languages. This means
that the former will disallow extraction from within the determiner phrase,
and the latter do not contain this kind of structural barrier. Hence, the only
way to insert a clitic inside a Bulgarian or Macedonian phrase and make it
(superficially) discontinuous is through PF deletion in multiple copies of
this phrase, which in this system are created by multiattachment. In the other
languages, Remnant Movement and Left Branch extraction are legitimate.
A big part of this chapter deals with “the mapping from syntactic phrasing
into prosodic phrasing” in accordance with Selkirk’s Match Theory (Selkirk
1994). This theory matches different levels of syntactic structure onto
different prosodic units: a clause to an utterance, a phrase to an
I(ntonation)-Phrase and a syntactic word to a P(honological)-Word. South
Slavic clitics are deficient in all respects (prosodic, semantic and
syntactic, p. 160); yet they are subject to different prosodic restrictions.
The chapter addresses cases where prosodic restrictions overlay LCA in syntax.
To account for such a mismatch, the author appeals to optimality
theoretic-like constraints. The main proposal here is that in spite of surface
distinctions in the behavior of Bulgarian, Macedonian, Bosnian-Serbo-Croatian
and Slovenian clitics, they all obey the overlay prosodic restriction
prohibiting them to initiate an Utterance.
Chapter 5, which the author calls the Appendix, deals with two concrete issues
of South Slavic syntax: “(i) the idiosyncratic properties of the third
singular form (j)e, and (ii) the problem of variation in Person-Case
Constraint Effects” (p. 30). The theoretical machinery developed and tested in
the other chapters is applied to these problems.
EVALUATION
The book is a masterful elaboration on challenging syntactic problems
permeating the majority of languages. The organisation and presentation of the
material is clear and stylistically superb. The solutions proposed by the
author strike me as technically complex but at the same time convincing. The
analytic tools are highly original and can serve as a basis of a fully fledged
theory in its own right. The explanations given are amply illustrated by
empirical data and detailed diagrams.
The main fault I find with the monograph is that its title is slightly
misleading. Syntax and Spell-Out in Slavic sounds too general, almost like a
title of a handbook. As a consequence, the book can attract all kinds of
interested researchers not suspecting what it is actually about. In fact,
nearly half of the work is a theoretical layout of the author’s ideas
applicable to any language. Indeed, the examples provided in the first part
are taken from English, French, Romanian, and German, against which South
Slavic, Russian and Polish examples look like just additional evidence for the
universal nature of the matters discussed rather than the illustration of the
subject matter of the author’s research. Slavic in the title does not include
East Slavic and West Slavic. In other words, the book represents an incredibly
technical and original analysis of SOME problems of SOME Slavic languages.
My other insignificant complaint concerns the connection between the chapters.
For instance, Chapter 2 and Chapter 4 look like parts of a different book,
albeit by the same author. At the same time, if I had a task of selecting my
favorite parts of the monograph, they would again be Chapter 2 and Chapter 4,
since they show the heights a generative analysis can reach tackling very
complex data.
My relevant theoretical background is inferior to that of the author, so most
of my questions arise from the need to clarify a number of issues, and I will
not ask them here. Reading the monograph I was wondering how the same problems
would be solved in a different framework, like, for example, nanosyntax. In
his recent paper, Caha (2018) compares the operation of vocabulary insertion
in nanosyntax and Distributed Morphology. It follows from the article that a
lot of machinery involved in creating complex heads necessary for Spell-Out in
the present theory could be eliminated by phrasal Spell-Out.
The audience of this work should have a solid generative grammar background.
To fully appreciate the monograph, the potential reader would need an advanced
knowledge of the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995), Phase Theory (Chomsky
2001), Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantx 1993, Marantz 1997), Linear
Correspondence Axiom (Kayne 1994), anti-locality (Abels 2003, Grohmann 2003),
and even Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993). It might be
interesting to researchers of South Slavic syntax, especially such issues as
wh-movement, pronominal and auxiliary clitics and ellipsis. It is a must for
those who would like to read the next publication by the author, devoted to
the nominal structure of South Slavic (Franks, in progress).
REFERENCES
Abels, Klaus. 2003. Successive Cyclicity, Anti-Locality and Adposition
Stranding. Ph.D. diss., University of Connecticut.
Bošković, Željko. 2005. “On the Locality of Left Branch Extraction and the
Structure of NP.” Studia Linguistica 59: 1–45.
Caha, Pavel. 2018. “Notes on Insertion in Distributed Morphology and
Nanosyntax”. In Exploring Nanosyntax, edited by Lena Baunaz, Karen De Clercq,
Liliane Haegeman, and Eric Lander, 57-87. OUP.
Chomsky, Noam. 1993. “A Minimalist Program for Linguistic Theory.” In The View
from Building 20: Essays in Linguistics in Honor of Sylvain Bromberger, edited
by Kenneth Hale and S. Jay Keyser, 1–52. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, Noam. 2001. “Derivation by Phase.” In Ken Hale: A Life in Language,
edited by Michael Kenstowicz, 1–52. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Franks, Steven. In Progress. Microvariation in the South Slavic Noun Phrase.
Bloomington, IN: Slavica.
Franks, Steven, and Joshua Herring. 2011. “Against Copies: A Computational
Model of Chain Formation and Spell-Out.” Poster presented at the Lin-guistics
Society of America Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh, PA, January 6–9.
Grohmann, Kleanthes. 2003. Prolific Domains: On the Anti-Locality of Movement
Dependencies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Halle, Morris. 1997. “Distributed Morphology: Impoverishment and Fission.” In
PF: Papers at the Interface, edited by Benjamin Bruening, Yoonjung Kang, and
Martha McGinnis, 425–49. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 30. Cam-bridge, MA:
Dept. of Linguistics, MIT.
and Alec Marantz. 1993. “Distributed Morphology and the Pieces of Inflection.”
In The View from Building 20: Essays in Linguistics in Honor of Sylvain
Bromberger, edited by Kenneth Hale and Samuel Jay Keyser, 111–76. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Kayne, Richard. 1994. The Antisymmetry of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Marantz, Alec. 1997. “No Escape from Syntax: Don't Try Morphological Analysis
in the Privacy of Your Own Lexicon.” University of Pennsylvania Working Papers
in Linguistics 4: 201–25.
Prince, Alan and Paul Smolensky. 1993. Optimality Theory: Constraint
Interaction in Generative Grammar. Blackwell Publishers.
Selkirk, Elisabeth. 2011. “The Syntax-Phonology Interface.” In The Handbook of
Phonologi-cal Theory, 2nd ed., edited by John Goldsmith, Jason Riggle, and
Alan Yu, 435–84. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Eugenia Romanova holds a PhD from Tromsø University in Norway. Her thesis
deals with the problems of verbal prefixation, event and argument structure
and syntax-semantics interface in the Russian language. At present she is a
lecturer in linguistics in Yekaterinburg, Russia.
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