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Bouchard, Denis. 1995.

  The semantics of syntax: a minimalist approach

to grammar.

  Chicago Lon don: The Universi ty of Chicag o Press.

Pp.xii i+525.

The (main) title of the book under review is strikingly similar to the title of

one of Ann a Wierzb icka 's w orks: most readers of this journa l will be familiar

with

  T he semantics of gramm ar

  (W ierzbicka 1988). Th e subtitle suggests an

entirely different approach, more in line with C hom sky 's latest endeavours to

combat what he now perceives as the excessive complexity of syntactic

theory in the government and binding framework. Curiously, although there

are a number of other references to work published in 1993 and beyond, the

one single reference to Ch om sky 's minimalist program (more could not have

been expected from a work published in 1995) is, not to Ch apter 1 in H ale

and K eyser (1 993 ), but to its preprint, the first installment of the named   MIT

Occasional Papers in Linguistics.

Bouchard's main thesis is a rather bold one, viz. ' that most linguistic

theories are based on the wrong sem antics' (p.3). It 's an even bolder thesis if

one realises that quite a num ber of fashionable linguistic theories these days

do not seem to be based on any serious semantics at all. Although W ierzbicka

is nowhere m entioned (she did spend some time at M IT, roughly twenty-five

year s ago , but she did not stay there long enough and was too critical of w hat

was going on to be taken seriously), it would appear that the methodology

which she has painstakingly built up, on her own at first and now with

increasing num bers of collaborators, is dangerously close to those rejected by

the author, w ho lum ps together 'structuralists' such as Tesniere and Greim as,

'generativists' such as Chomsky and Jackendoff, and 'cognitivists' such as

  akoff

Lang acker and Fillm ore. Th e labels in inverted com ma s are mine and

are of course in part arbitrary: it is well known that Tesniere is in many

respects a forerunner of generative gram m ar, and that Jackend off

 

work has

been assessed by 'cognitivists' with far more sympathy (though not full

agreem ent) than m ost other research carried out in a generative framew ork

(see Geeraerts 1996, Dascal 1996). The reason why so many approaches are

w rong is that they are 'glo ba l': they incorporate information wh ich belongs to

the   background  know ledge shared by speak ers , and beca use i t is

'background knowledge' it plays no explanatory role in grammar. The

incorporation of this type of knowledge has resulted in semantic

representations which are increasingly different from the corresponding

syntactic representations, so that mapping beco m es very difficult indeed, due

to a distortion of the correspondence between semantics and syntax.

To overcome the problems faced by 'global' approaches, Bouchard purges

his

  semantic representations of background knowledge, thereby ending up

with a much simplified formalism which can be mapped onto the syntax by

means of 'principled, straightforward correspondence rules' (p.3). Chapter 1

 4

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R E V I E W S

(pp.3-71) contrasts the global approaches with the new selective approach,

shows how the latter leads to a minimalist approach to grammar, and what the

effects are on the autonomy of and the relationship between form and

meaning. Chapter 2 (pp.72-115) provides further information on how

Bouchard views the relationship between conceptual structure, strictly

linguistic (i.e. selective) sem antics and syntactic structure.

W hereas Part I of the book (i.e. Chap ters 1 and 2) is basically theory-

oriented, Parts II (Chapter 3) and III (Chapters 4 and 5) are much more

empirically based. In Part II, the focus is on the effects which a selective

semantics approach has on lexical analysis and on the lexicon. Chapter 3

(pp.119-254) contains an extremely detailed case study of the French verbs

venir, aller, arriver,

  and more cursory observations on three other verbs, viz.

partir, entrer  and sortir.  Various intransitive uses of all six verbs are listed,

before Bouchard goes on to talk about their transitive usage, and about such

other problems as the choice of auxiliary (with these and other verbs), the

stative and active readings of the past participle (the former reading is

excluded with

  aller

  and

  venir),

  and the possibility of an imp ersonal

construction (generally OK w ith all, except aller-  which only allows for such

a construction in very specific co ntexts).

Part III talks about the effects of the selective semantics approach in the

area of syntax. Chapter 4 (pp.259-386) is entirely devoted to the so-called

Psych verbs of French. The new analysis which is proposed serves as an

alternative to the older approach according to which one of the two traditional

Psych verb constructions (viz. the  frighten  or  degouter  class) had to be

derived through object-to-subject raising, an operation which was quite

unnecessary in the case of the other construction (viz. the

 fear

  or

  mepriser

class).  Bouchard does not allow for movement transformations at all in his

framework. Chapter 5 (pp.387-448) does away with the notion of verb

m ovem ent, usually invoked to explain differences in the position of adverbs

in French and English, to explain the presence of

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force (cf.  HF rappe-le par ton intelligence,  but OK  Frappe-le par ton

intelligence, et tout ira bien

  = 5/

  tu le frappes par ton intelligence, tout ira

bien:

  both are in the imperative form, but only the former has imperative

force).

 It is good to see that generativists are becoming m ore and m ore aware

of the subtle realities of language use. Bouchard's observation improves on

an early remark by Nicolas Ruwet, who has come a long way, too, as I have

tried to show elsewhere (Peeters 1994).

The above remarks cannot possibly do justice to the book under review.

B ou ch ard 's w ork deserves close scrutiny, which it is likely to get from other

review ers, especially in journ als dealing specifically with French linguistics.

This reviewer will want to refer back to it because of what the author has to

say, for instance, about unaccusativity in French (Peeters in preparation),

about auxiliary choice (Peeters forthcoming a) and about past partciple

agreement (Peeters forthcoming b; see also Bouchard 1987, 1992). These

and other topics addressed by the author are often highly controversial, and

what Bouchard has to say about them will help all those who are struggling

with the intricacies of French g ramm ar to get one step closer to the light at the

end of the tunnel.

R E F E R E N C E S

Bouchard, Denis. 1987. A few remarks on past participle agreement.

Linguistics and Philosophy  10. 449-474.

Bouchard, Denis. 1992. Accord du participe passé et choix d'auxiliaire. In

Tasmowski, Liliane and Zribi-Hertz, Anne (eds),

  De la musique a la

linguistique. Homm ages a Nicolas Ruwet.  Gand: Communication and

Cognition. 191-204.

Dascal, Marcelo (ed.). 1996. Special issue of the journal   Pragm atics and

Cognition

  (4:1) on 'Language and consciousness'.

Geeraerts, Dirk (ed.). 1996. Special issue of the journal  Cognitive

Linguistics  (7: 1) on 'Cog nitive linguistics and Jack end off s cogn itive

approach' .

Hale ,  Kenneth; Keyser, Samuel (eds). 1993.

  The view from Building 20.

Essays in linguistics in honor of Sylvain Brom berger.

  Cambridge, Mass.:

M IT Press.

Peeters, Bert. 1994. Syntax and hum an experience. La perspective de

Nicolas Ruwet.

 C anadian Journal of Linguistics

  39. 225-234.

Peeters, Bert. Forthcoming a. Choix de l'auxiliaire et serialisation verbale.

Un parallélisme ignoré. Revue Québécoise de Linguistique.

Peeters, Bert. Forthcom ing b. L'a cco rd du participe passe et la notion d'objet

affecté.  Le Français Moderne.

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REVIEWS

Peeters, Bert. In preparation. Ergativity in an accusative language, with

special reference to French.

Wierzbicka, Anna. 1988.  The semantics of grammar.  Amsterdam: John

Benjamins.

Review ed by Bert Peeters

Department of Modern Languages

University of Tasmania

GP O Box 252C

Hobart TAS 7001

AUSTRALIA

König, Ekkehard and van der Auwera, Johan (eds). 1994.

  The Germanic

languages.

  London: Routledge. Pp.xv+6 31.

This book is one of the very valuable books emerging from Routledge

Lang uage Fam ily Descriptions series, which already contains volumes on the

Ro m ance, C eltic and Slavonic language s. Th e Preface states in respect of the

series: '...the goal is to present a comp rehensive but compact o verview of the

structure of all m em bers of a language family in a discursive style of narrative

and within a framework that stresses common ground and convergent

features in traditional and current linguistic theorizing rather than

controversies and mutually incompatible v iew s' (p.ix).

The present volume consists of, apart from the opening overview by Carol

Hendriksen and van der Auwera, four chapters on historical stages of the

various G erm anic languag es, so from a diachronic perspective, and a further

thirteen, by a number of different specialists, containing synchronic

descriptions - with occasional references to diachronic aspects - of existing

Germanic languages. These range from Icelandic and Faroese through the

other North Germanic languages and on via German, Yiddish, Pennsylvania

German, Dutch, Afrikaans, Frisian to English and closing with Suzanne

Romaine's 'Germanic Creoles', which are, apart from a handful of now

virtually defunct Dutch and German based ones, English based. It is thus a

very different book from H.F. Nielsen's recent one of the same title (Nielsen,

1989), which is entirely his own and purely historical. W hile one m ight h ave

hoped there would be a chapter as well on Swiss vernacular German, which

is virtually regarded in Sw itzerland as a separate language from the standard

German used there, the editors have expressly excluded it (p.ix), probably

because it is dealt with in another Routledge publication on German dialects

(Russ, 1990) that provides an excellent complement to this one (though it too

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