16.26, Review: Syntax: Rizzi, ed. (2004)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-26. Mon Jan 10 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.26, Review: Syntax: Rizzi, ed. (2004)

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1)
Date: 10-Jan-2005
From: Andrew Carnie < carnie at linguistlist.org >
Subject: The Structure of CP and IP: The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, Vol. 2 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2005 20:36:07
From: Andrew Carnie < carnie at linguistlist.org >
Subject: The Structure of CP and IP: The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, Vol. 2 
 

EDITOR: Rizzi, Luigi
TITLE: The Structure of CP and IP
SUBTITLE: The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, Vol. 2
SERIES: Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2004
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-1947.html


Andrew Carnie, University of Arizona

This book, which contains papers presented at the "Workshop on the 
Cartography of Syntactic Positions and Semantic Types" (Certosa di 
Pontignano, Siena, November 25- 26, 1999), presents a variety of articles 
on the architecture of the functional categories in the clause. This book 
is part of a series of three such volumes that focus on the nature and 
organization of the functional structure of the clause and other phrases. 
The other two books: Cinque's (2002) _The structure of DP and IP: The 
Cartography of Syntactic Structures_, and Belletti's (2004) _Structures 
and Beyond: The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, Vol. 1_ have been 
reviewed in LINGUIST issues http://linguistlist.org/issues/14/14-1479.html
and http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-3497.html
respectively. The topic/focus of this volume, not to pun too much, is on
topic/focus structure in the CP (complementizer phrase) and IP (inflectional
phrase) domains. The papers mostly have grown out of a tradition of work started
by Rizzi in his (1997 and subsequent) work on the "fine structure of the left
periphery of the clause" in which a variety of functional heads (Topic, Focus,
Finite, Force) replace the more traditional CP, as well as out of the older
tradition exploring "expanded" INFL which started with Pollock's (1989) paper,
and was the height of fashion in early Minimalism.

The book opens with a very interesting survey of the question of clausal 
cartography by Luigi Rizzi ("On the Cartography of Syntactic Structures"). 
Rizzi observes that the study of clausal cartography in generative grammar 
starts with the discussion of affix hopping in _Syntactic Structures_ 
(Chomsky 1957). X-bar theory brought the question of the nature of 
functional projections to the forefront resulting in the proposals for 
CPs, IPs, and DPs, The empirical questions of argument licensing, adjunct 
licensing, head positions and head movement all provide us with insights 
into the nature of the functional architecture of the clause.  In addition 
to this historical survey, and a summary of all the papers in the volume, 
Rizzi provides a very thought-provoking discussion of how minimalist 
thinking and the reduction of functionality to features has resulted in an 
apparent "maximization" of the number of functional categories. He 
observes that this kind of investigation has forced researchers to 
consider more finely grained semantic analyses including reference to 
discourse/pragmatic factors such as topicality and focus. It was this that 
led Rizzi to his influential proposal that the CP structure was more 
properly divided into Force, Finiteness, Topic and Focus functional 
projections. This proposal forms the starting point from which many papers 
in this book develop.

Adriana Belletti's contribution, "Aspects of the Low IP Area", is a 
beautifully argued article. She claims that parallel to the Focus/Topic 
structure found in the CP domain there are Focus and Topic projections 
between the IP and the v/VP. The main empirical domain of inquiry in the 
paper is the nature of post-verbal subjects. She contrasts Free Inversion 
(FI) from Stylistic Inversion (SI); the latter type exhibited in French. 
Using evidence from adverbs, extraction, and negative polarity items, she 
shows that SI shows the properties we might expect of elements in the CP 
domain, but subjects in FI appears to be low in the structure. Belletti 
demonstrates that the subjects in FI constructions behave like foci. She 
goes on to compare ungrammatical VSO structures to those with a PP 
complement (VSPP); she gives an explanation of this in terms of case and 
relativized minimality. She also compares two VOS orders and orders in 
which the post-verbal subject appears to be topical rather than focal.

As mentioned above, the argumentation in this paper is exquisite and very 
convincing. Indeed, I intend to assign this paper to my students as an 
example of how to make arguments about clausal architecture. One point 
that stuck in my craw, however, was the fairly extensive literature 
comparing and attempting to explain VSO structures in Spanish and Romanian 
(and other romance languages), but no reference was made to the quite 
extensive literature on argument licensing and information structure in 
VSO languages outside of Romance (not to toot my own horn, but see for 
example, the contributions in Carnie & Guilfoyle (2000) and Carnie, Harley 
and Dooley (2005)). This literature contains fairly extensive discussion 
of argument licensing and information structure in many languages that 
seem to make use of the "lower" topic/focus domain that Belletti so aptly 
identifies in Italian.

Paola Beninca' and Cecilia Poletto use evidence from a number of Italian 
dialects and closely related Romance forms to argue for a modified and 
more fine-grained CP layer than that proposed by Rizzi. Their 
paper "Topic, Focus, and V2: Defining the CP sublayers" first argues, on 
the basis of weak crossover effects and interpretation, that of Rizzi's 
original [Topic [Focus [Topic [IP]]] structure, the lower of the two 
topics is more properly analyzed an informational focus position. Using 
cross- dialectal evidence and verb second (V2) phenomena, they distinguish 
this position from the higher focus, which they claim is contrastive. They 
also claim that the Topic projection is also more finely articulated into 
Hanging Topic, Scene Setting adverbials, (both of which constitute 
the "Frame"), Left Dislocated Structures and List Interpreted items (which 
constitute the "theme").

The next paper in the volume, Valentina Bianchi's "Resumptive Relatives 
and LF chains", is a bit of an odd man out in a volume on functional 
architecture. Although she makes use of Rizzi's ForceP and proposes a 
GroundP (which seems to be similar to the "Frame" of Beninca' and Poletto 
(above)), there is very little about the analysis that bears on the 
question of functional cartography. Nevertheless the paper is interesting 
in and of itself. Bianchi surveys different types resumptive strategies in 
different types of relative clauses, and explains why some types of 
relative clauses resist resumption and others require it. She draws upon 
Enc's  (1991) notion of referential index, and claims that resumptive 
pronouns are spell-outs of these indexes on the tail of movement chains.

The paper by Anna Cardinaletti, "Toward a Cartography of Subject 
Positions", is a useful complement to Belletti's contribution. While 
Belletti focuses on post-verbal subjects in Italian and related languages, 
Cardinaletti focuses primarily on preverbal subject positions (although 
she does have a brief discussion of VP internal and "middle field" 
subjects as well, including the functional projection where case 
assignment occurs). Cardinaletti claims that there are at least three 
distinct functional projections between the CP domain and the surface 
position of the verb. She distinguishes between a relatively low AgrS, 
which hosts light pronouns and pro, an intermediate EPP head, which can 
host locative subjects and expletives, and SubjP, which hosts the "subject 
of Predication" argument. Like Belletti's paper, the argumentation is 
extremely elegant, however one wonders the extent to which Cardinaletti 
and Belletti's accounts are compatible.

Like Bianchi's paper, Carlo Cecchetto's "Remnant Movement in the theory of 
Phases" only tangentially addresses the question of clausal cartography, 
by claiming that each of Rizzi's CP articulations can count independently 
as a "phase-edge" for the CP. The focus of Cecchetto's extremely dense and 
difficult to follow paper, however, is on remnant movement. He is most 
interested in distinguishing between cases where remnant movement results 
in what has traditionally been treated as a relativized minimality effect, 
to those that are fully grammatical. The standard account is based on the 
observation that remnant movement over an element extracted from that 
remnant is ungrammatical when the two movements are of the same kind. 
Cecchetto marshals a number of arguments against this approach. 
Unfortunately, I found none of them terribly convincing. Some of his 
arguments are based on the claim that Japanese scrambling is "semantically 
vacuous", which, to say the least, is very controversial. His other 
arguments all rest on the assumption that given the configuration 
(a) [...[Z ... t-x...]... X ... t-z] 
is unacceptable because underlyingly the structure is  
(b) [... ___... [Z ... X...]], 
where Z is a closer target for the movement to the surface position of X 
in (a). Note however, there is another interpretation of the 
ungrammaticality of structures such as (a): note that in (a), X is a 
closer potential antecedent for the trace than the remnant constituent Z. 
All of Cecchetto's arguments against a relativized minimality account rest 
on the fact that Z is the intervening category, not X. Cecchetto provides 
an account given in terms of phase edges and the Chomsky's phase 
impenetrability condition (PIC).

"Complementizer Deletion in Italian" by Alessandra Giorgi and Fabio 
Pianesi examines the close interrelationship of the low CP domain (mood) 
and the high IP domain (AgrS). They claim that the phenomenon of 
complementizer deletion (CD) in Italian is neither deletion nor V to C 
movement. Instead they appeal to a notion of feature "Scattering" (where 
by features maybe distributed, in order, across a number of different 
functional categories), and lexicalization. CD deletion occurs when Mood 
features and Agreement features syncretize on a single head. _Che_ by 
contrast, appears when Mood and agreement appear in separate heads. The 
analysis is pleasing and explanatory, but I think it might be refined if 
it were cast in terms of the theory of Distributed Morphology, and instead 
of "scattering" the authors could make use of a universal set of 
functional categories and feature distributions and appeal to head fusion 
and the principles of vocabulary insertion.

 In the first of two papers on clitics, Rita Manzini and Leonardo Savoia 
("Clitics: Cooccurrence and Mutual Exclusion Patterns), argue for an 
approach like Sportiche (1996) that clitics represent functional 
categories both within DPs and within clauses. They propose a hierarchy of 
D-op, D, R, Q, P, Loc, and N.  P represents discourse reference, limited 
to objects; Loc is for demonstratives; R is for specifics, D, Q, and N 
have their usual values (Determiner, Quantifier, and Noun); and D-op is to 
host partitive "of". These functional categories are merged in their 
surface position (which may be above C, between C and I and between I and 
V). Mutually exclusive clitics are not ruled out by a competition-based 
mechanism (such as Optimality Theory) or by a DM-style Elsewhere 
principle, instead by simple syntactic parameters that govern the relative 
order of clitics and the cases where two clitics may not cooccur.

"On the Left Periphery of Some Romance Wh-questions", by Cecilia Poletto 
and Jean-Yves Pollock, considers the structure of wh-questions and 
stylistic inversions in French, Italian and Bellunese. They follow Kayne 
(1998) in assuming that there is no covert movement. Apparent covert 
relations are actually overt movements with subsequent remnant movement 
obscuring the initial move. Furthermore, they claim that subject clitic 
inversion does not involve any head-movement but is also the consequence 
of remnant movement. They argue for a left periphery consisting of 
[ Op2 [ Force [ Ground [ Top [  Op1  [IP]]]]]]. The two Op positions attract two 
different kinds of wh-words. The higher one for wh-phrases that previously 
would have been analyzed as having moved overtly, and the lower for object 
wh-in situ. Depending upon the construction, the specifiers of ForceP, 
GroundP and TopP are the landing sites for various movements and remnants.

Ian Robert's "The C-System in Brythonic Celtic Languages, V2, and the 
EPP", relates the requirement on Brythonic Celtic (Welsh and Breton) to 
have preverbal particles to the requirements of V-movement in V2 
constructions in the Germanic languages (and the partial V2 nature of 
Breton). He claims that both phenomena are part of a general requirement 
that Finite be filled. He also argues that the complementizer particles in 
Celtic (including Irish) are actually lower (in Finite) than those of 
English (in force), which explains the apparent variation in adverbial 
placement in Celtic and Germanic, discussed by McCloskey (1996). This is a 
nicely argued paper, and one that is causing me to rethink my own analyses 
of Irish complementizers and copular constructions. I'm a little 
disappointed however about an important gap in its citations and 
discussion. The literature on Celtic is not vast and there is a recent 
paper by Hendrick (2000) that covers much of the same ground (and reaches 
related, but different conclusions) about the organization of the C system 
at least; the proposals in that paper should have been addressed here.

The last paper in the volume, by Ur Shlonsky ("Enclisis and Proclisis"), 
claims that variation among Romance varieties (and extended to various 
dialects of Berber) in terms of whether clitics are realized as pro- or 
enclitics, is due to whether the verb has fully checked its features below 
the clitic head or must do further checking above it. Enclisis is true 
head-to-head movement. Attaching a verb to a clitic results in the verb 
(and its features from being inaccessible for further checking.) Proclisis 
by contrast occurs only when enclisis cannot and results, at least in 
part, from two separate adjunctions to a single head. Crosslinguistic 
variation is due to differences in where the cliticization occurs with 
respect to negation, finite inflection and relevant features in C. This 
paper is an interesting complement to Manzini and Savoia's paper and I 
would have liked to have seen (in both papers) a comparison of their 
approaches.

Overall this book is an important contribution to our understanding of 
clausal architecture and the number and nature of the CP and IP domains in 
minimalist syntax. Rizzi's (1997) work has clearly opened up a rich domain 
of inquiry, as the papers in this volume show.

Before I launch into a couple of conceptual issues that I have with the 
approach and its virtues and problems, I'd like to point out a couple of 
minor editorial issues. First, this book is based on a series of papers 
given at a workshop in 1999. The five-year lag between presentation and 
publication gives some of the papers a vaguely asynchronic feel. Some of 
the papers have clearly been updated to reflect more modern thinking; 
others have not. I'm a great believer that edited volumes, even those that 
come out of conferences, should make a clear attempt to get the papers to 
cross-reference each other, and where appropriate discuss each other's 
analyses. There is almost no cross-referencing between the papers here, 
even when the papers are clearly closely related in either topic or 
analysis. Finally, I know from experience that Oxford's proofreaders are 
excellent, but they seem to have fallen down on the job in a number of the 
papers in this volume. Particularly frustrating are the diagrams that have 
been misaligned. For example, the schematic of Benica' and Poletto's 
analysis (their example 58) is absolutely impossible to understand, as it 
has been split onto two lines and skewed out of shape. Similarly, 
throughout there are many cases where bracket labels are not subscripted, 
which makes them very difficult to distinguish from the heads. In 
Cecchetto's article the definition of the PIC appears to be part of the 
main body of the text, which makes it very hard to follow. These may be 
minor points, but they take away from the important issues and results in 
the papers.

Turning now to the question of the overall research program that drives 
this volume: With the exception of Cecchetto, Roberts and Shlonsky (who 
address Japanese, Celtic and Germanic, and Berber respectively), the bulk 
of the papers in this volume focus on Romance languages, and in particular 
on Italian dialects. This should not be entirely surprising given who the 
authors and editor are, and given that the conference underlying the book 
was sponsored by the Italian Ministry of Education. However, it does bring 
two thoughts to my mind. On one hand, it is clear that looking at micro-
variation among closely related dialects gives us interesting and 
comprehensive results. The sophisticated analyses in this volume attest to 
this. On the other hand, one might wish that a broader crosslinguistic 
perspective on the issue. This could help confirm the results, and show 
that the phenomena in question aren't merely Romance centered. I hope the 
series editors might consider a fourth volume in the series that address 
variation in more language outside the Indo-European core that is the 
focus of this book.

This said, I have to laud the editor and contributors on another ground: 
This book clearly brings into the light a domain of inquiry that has been 
taboo for too long in mainstream Chomskyan syntax: the role of information 
structure and discourse/pragmatics on word order and word order 
alternations. The importance of these factors has too long been ignored 
and left to functionalists to investigate. This volume is an important 
step forward in formalizing such notions as topic, focus, theme, rheme, 
ground, and force into current Chomskyan theorizing.

REFERENCES

Carnie, Andrew and Eithne Guilfoyle (2002) (eds.) _The Syntax of Verb 
Initial Languages_ Oxford: Oxford University Press

Carnie, Andrew, Heidi Harley, and Sheila Dooley, eds. (2005) _Verb First_. 
Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 

Chomsky, Noam (1957) _Syntactic Structures_ The Hague: Mouton.

Enç, Murvet (1991) "The Semantics of Specificity." _Linguistic Inquiry_ 
22: 1-25.

Hendrick, Randall (2000) "Celtic Initials" in Carnie and Guilfoyle (eds.) 
_The Syntax of Verb Initial Languages_ Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kayne, Richard (1998) "Overt vs. Covert Movement." _Syntax_ 1: 128-191

McCloskey, James (1996) "On the Scope of Verb Movement in Irish" _Natural 
Language and Linguistic Theory_ 14: 47-104.

Pollock, Jean-Yves (1989) "Verb Movement, Universal Grammar and the 
Structure of IP" _Linguistic Inquiry_ 20: 365-424.

Rizzi, Luigi (1997) "The Fine Structure of the Left Periphery" in L. 
Haegeman (ed). _Elements of Grammar_ Dordrecht: Kluwer, 281-387.

Sportiche, Dominique (1996) "Clitic Constructions" in J. Rooryck and L. 
Zaring (eds.) _Phrase Structure and the Lexicon._ Dordrecht: Kluwer, 213-
276. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Andrew Carnie is an Associate Professor of syntactic theory in the 
department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona, Tucson. His 
research interests include representations of constituency, case, and VSO 
languages. He has published 3 edited volumes, and the textbook _Syntax: A 
Generative Introduction_.





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