16.23, Review: Ling Theories: Cheng & Sybesma, ed. (2002)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-23. Mon Jan 10 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.23, Review: Ling Theories: Cheng & Sybesma, ed. (2002)

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1)
Date: 10-Jan-2005
From: Larry LaFond < llafond at siue.edu >
Subject: The Second Glot International State-of-the-Article Book 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2005 20:24:48
From: Larry LaFond < llafond at siue.edu >
Subject: The Second Glot International State-of-the-Article Book 
 

EDITORS: Cheng, Lisa; Sybesma, Rint
TITLE: The Second Glot International State-of-the-Article Book
SUBTITLE: The Latest in Linguistics
SERIES: Studies in Generative Grammar 61
PUBLISHER: Mouton de Gruyter
YEAR: 2002
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-1528.html


Larry L. LaFond, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

INTRODUCTION

This volume brings together fifteen articles that provide an overview of 
some of the most important linguistic developments during the last decade. 
The intent of each paper is to capture the prominent themes and issues 
related to its area of focus, describe progress that has been made, 
indicate questions still to be answered, and supply an extensive 
bibliography for those interested in further study.  Earlier versions of 
each of the papers in this volume appeared in GLOT INTERNATIONAL as 'State-
of-the-Article' contributions, although each of those earlier versions 
were updated and revised to include further developments since the time of 
their original publication.  The papers in this volume assume a generative 
perspective and focus on semantics and syntax, though a few papers are 
also included that relate to phonology, morphology and first language 
development.  The papers stand on their own, without any introduction or 
framing by the editors.

SYNOPSIS

Lightfoot's 'The development of grammars' opens the series of articles. 
Lightfoot first considers the nature of the experience that triggers the 
development of grammars in children, discussing several recent error-
driven models (where learners converge on a grammar that matches up with 
environmental input, within a space defined by UG) and how cue-based 
theories differ from those input matching models.  Lightfoot then looks at 
extensions of the cue-based acquisition approach to diachronic change in 
grammars.  In the process, he argues for cue-based approaches to 
acquisition and against lexicalist theories of grammar, an independent 
theory of change, and the incorporation of historicist elements into UG.

Two papers on semantics follow Lightfoot's paper: Authier's 'Semantics and 
the Generative Enterprise' and Portner's 'The semantics of Mood.' Authier, 
through an examination of quantifier scope, bare output conditions, and 
the mapping from LF to logical representations, argues against the notion 
that generative grammar has little to say about meaning-related phenomena. 
Authier suggests that while the range of semantic phenomena that have been 
examined within a generative framework only partially overlaps with the 
concerns of model-theoretic semanticists, the phenomena which have been 
studied have yielded important issues and conditions for interpretation, 
enough so that a more clearly articulated theory of the syntax-semantics 
interface is needed.  Portner discusses the core phenomenon of mood as 
viewed within traditional grammar and then expands the discussion to other 
senses of the term.  He outlines some of the central data that research on 
mood has attempted to address: the distribution of mood in root clauses, 
the distribution of subjunctives in embedded clauses, and embedded 
indicatives. He then outlines the major differences between theoretical 
analyses and concludes with a summary of future directions.

Portner is followed by de Swart's 'Three approaches to discourse and 
donkey anaphora' and a second paper related to quantifiers, 
Bobaljik's 'Floating quantifiers: Handle with care.'  De Swart compares 
the option of saying that the anaphoric pronoun in donkey anaphora cannot 
be interpreted in terms of regular coreference or binding with two other 
options: one, that interprets indefinite NPs as variables and use 
unselective binding to allow them to be bound by other quantifiers in the 
discourse, and another, that  views the licensing problem as a problem 
with the definition of the binding domain.  Bobaljik's discussion provides 
historical perspective on floating quantifiers up through the 1980s as a 
background to discussing work done since then on stranding and the 
semantics of floating quantifiers. Bobaljik concludes that caution should 
be used in regarding floating quantifiers as tests for underlying 
constituent structure, but that they are connected to predication and that 
their distribution is attributable to movement and/or binding. 

Carlson's 'No lack of determination,' de Hoop's 'Partitivity', and 
Szabolcsi and den Dikken's 'Islands' present additional areas of syntactic 
and semantic interfaces.  Carlson focuses on interpretations of Bare 
Plurals, looking specifically at the question of whether Bare Plurals have 
a single, unified meaning (one which appears to be different in different 
contexts), or whether they have more than one unified meaning. Carlson 
concludes that general agreement exists that existential and generic 
readings of Bare Plurals should find some commonality in analysis, and 
that specificity and scope are important issues for indefinite readings.  
Beyond this, however, Carlson sees a 'bewildering variety of proposals' 
related to the source of existential quantification in some Bare Plurals.  
Partitive elements also make certain sets or entities accessible for 
quantification; so argues de Hoop in her article which describes the 
similarities between different types of partitivity.  De Hoop sees a 
distinction between ordinary partitives (where quantification involves 
restricted or contextually bound sets) and pseudo-partitives, faded 
partitives, and partitive Case (where the set available for quantification 
is unrestricted or unbounded.)  Finally, Szabolcsi and den Dikken's 
article on 'Islands' presents a brief discussion of strong islands and a 
more extensive discussion of weak islands, highlighting how the advent of 
Relativized Minimality has affected theories in this area.  The authors 
believe that many island conditions are semantic in nature and that the 
semantic approaches that currently hold the most promises are algebraic 
and dynamic versions of Scope Theory.

Four papers on syntax, albeit from widely different perspectives follow. 
The first, Progovac's 'Structure for coordination' divides nicely into 
three parts: a section introducing coordination data, one that surveys 
analyses of coordination that do not treat conjunctions as heads of 
conjunction phrases, and one that surveys analyses that do.   Progovac 
concludes that conjunctions are functional heads of Coordination Phrases, 
that in VO languages the first conjunct stands structurally apart from the 
rest of the Coordination Phrase, and that the conjunction and the non-
initial conjuncts form a structural unit.  Müller's 'Optionality in 
optimality-theoretic syntax' takes on a perplexing issue for most 
syntactic theories: syntactic optionality.  In the process, Müller not 
only succeeds in showing various optimality-theoretic approaches to 
optionality (pseudo-optionality, ordered global or local ties, conjunctive 
or disjunctive ties, neutralization, etc.), but also provides a 
description of optimality-theoretic approaches to syntax as well as what 
challenges optionality continues to pose for those working within this 
framework.  Rosen's 'The syntactic representation of linguistic events' 
discusses differing approaches to representing the relationship between 
events in the world and how these events become encoded in language.  
Rosen's paper summarizes a large body of research aimed at event 
classification, discusses three main theoretical approaches to event 
representation -- lexical, semantic, syntactic -- and then indicates major 
unanswered questions for this field.  Rosen concludes that events are 
represented, in some way, in all three of the above components of the 
grammar, but that relationship between the components has yet to be 
successfully explained.  

Manzini's 'Syntactic approaches to cliticization,' serves as the final 
syntax-related paper and the first of three papers related to phonological 
theory, and as bridge between the two fields.  Although clitics are a 
prosodic conception, the survey provided by Manzini adopts a syntactic 
perspective.  Beginning with Kayne's (1975) view of cliticization as a 
movement rule, Manzini then reviews developments in the 70s and 80s, and 
later analyses of clitics as inflectional heads, concluding that the 
current need is for a clear structural map of clitic positions and the 
parameters that account for them.  Manzini also includes a discussion of 
morphological and prosodic treatments of clitics.

Two final papers on phonology, Rice's 'Featural markedness in phonology: 
variation' and van Oostendorp's 'Schwa in phonological theory' deal, 
respectively, with general and specific phonological issues.  Rice queries 
how 'markedness' might be defined and what role markedness plays in a 
phonological system.  Rice discusses feature specification and feature 
classes, phonological diagnostics for markedness, variation in markedness 
(related to position, inventories, contrast, and phonetic space), and 
traditional diagnostics for markedness, frequency and implication.  Rice 
also includes a section which nicely exemplifies markedness in structural 
theories, Optimality Theory, and phonetic cue-based theories.  A more 
specific issue is taken up by van Oostendorp's article that considers 
schwa as an excellent test case for phonological theories.  Three types of 
schwa are defined and considered by van Oostendorp: one alternating with 
zero (epenthetic-schwa),  one alternating with a full vowel (reduction-
schwa), and a 'rest' case (stable-schwa).  Van Oostendorp discusses the 
representation and behavior of each of these schwas, concluding that a 
fully developed theory of syllable structure, metrical structure, 
segmental structure and the relationship between these parts is still 
needed.

Harley and Noyer's 'Distributed Morphology' is the final contribution of 
the book. A few of the earlier articles included brief discussion of 
interfaces between morphology and other components of grammar, but this 
article is the only one focused specifically on morphosyntax.  Throughout 
their paper, Harley and Noyer provide some review of the substantial body 
of literature that has arisen since Distributed Morphology (Halle and 
Marantz 1993) made its appearance in the early 1990s, however they 
concentrate their efforts on a presentation of Distributed Morphology's 
theoretical assumptions, its architecture, and illustrations of its 
implementation.  They attempt to show Distributed Morphology's 
contributions to grammatical theory and provide a solid introduction to 
the work that is going on within Distributed Morphology.  Harley and Noyer 
suggest that, going forward, the most important issues for this theory of 
grammar will relate to a reassessment of the inventory and bases for 
syntactic categories, a clearer description of universal morphosyntactic 
features, and a number of remaining questions related to Distributed 
Morphology's novel operations: impoverishment, fission, and morphological 
merger.

EVALUATION

Any volume which purports to review the most important achievements of the 
past decade will be subject to criticism by those who disagree with its 
conceptualization of what the most important issues or most pressing 
research questions are.  The last decade has seen significant work done in 
a great number of linguistic areas that do not find their way into this 
volume on the 'latest in linguistics.'  This is, perhaps, a forgivable 
transgression, given that no single volume could be expected to cover the 
full breadth of linguistic issues during an era, and particularly given 
that the focus of this series is on generative approaches to grammar. 
Nevertheless, one might reasonably expect a more extensive discussion of 
minimalism, generative approaches to second language acquisition, recent 
developments in construction grammar, or the inclusion of a broader range 
of issues that arise within generative grammar.  Future volumes of this 
nature could consider the possibility of not including multiple articles 
on semantics, phonology, or any other single area of linguistics, if the 
presence of multiple articles on a single area comes only at the expense 
of exclusion of a broader range of current topics in linguistics.  That 
the current volume leans most heavily towards semantics and interfaces 
between semantics and syntax will satisfy only a particular readership.

It is an interesting feature of the book that there is no introduction or 
preview to frame the articles, no biographical information given about the 
authors, few acknowledgements, and virtually no foot or endnotes.  Some 
might view these as failings, but presented as it is, the book gives the 
sense of presenting just the ideas, the questions, and references in an 
uncluttered and useful way.  I found it particularly useful that some 
authors (for example, Bobaljik, Harley and Noyer) separated the specific 
bibliography for their area of focus from other references that happened 
to be mentioned in their papers.  This provides a solid, targeted reading 
list for students or researchers working within the area of interest.

Some of the papers are more successful than others in helping non-
specialists get a feel for the kind of work that is being done in a 
specific area.  For example, the papers by Lightfoot, Portner, Müller, and 
Rice provide excellent, readable introductions to the issues in their 
respective fields.  I would not hesitate to steer students to these papers 
to get a broad introduction to those research areas.  Some of the other 
papers, while still very complete in presenting current issues, are less 
accessible to those who have not had formal training in that area.  For 
example, fully understanding de Swart's discussion of dynamic binding 
requires more than a rudimentary knowledge of propositional logic. 
Nevertheless, the bibliographies at the end of each of the articles make 
the volume invaluable, in fact, this feature alone makes the book useful 
for researchers and graduate students exploring the issues raised in this 
volume. 

In general, this book provides a good overview of the state of (some 
areas) of linguistic inquiry at the start of this millennium.  Readers 
will encounter interesting findings and ample evidence that linguistic 
research during the last decade has uncovered many of the questions yet to 
be answered. As nearly all of the authors in this volume point out, there 
is a still a need to delve more deeply into the host of unanswered 
questions. Each article here, probably appropriately, succeeds in being 
more a call to future work than a solution to a current problem. 

REFERENCES

Halle, M and H. Marantz. (1993). Distributed Morphology and the pieces of 
inflection.  In: The View from the Building 20, K. Hale and S. J. Keyser 
(eds.), 111-176. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Kayne, R. (1975). French Syntax: The transformational cycle. Cambridge: 
MIT Press. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Larry LaFond holds an MA in Applied Linguistics from Old Dominion 
University and a Ph.D in Linguistics from the University of South 
Carolina.  He is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Southern 
Illinois University Edwardsville.  His current research interests include 
interactions between discourse and syntax in L2 learning and the second 
language acquisition of motion events in English.





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