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Review Author(s): Steven Franks Review by: Steven Franks Source: Language, Vol. 75, No. 2 (Jun., 1999), pp. 368-370Published by: Linguistic Society of AmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/417272Accessed: 06-08-2015 21:13 UTC

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LANGUAGE, VOLUME 75, NUMBER 2 (1999)

The syntax of nonfinite complementation: An economy approach. By ZELJKO BOSKOVIC. (Linguistic Inquiry monographs, 43.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. Pp. 247.

Reviewed by STEVEN FRANKS, Indiana University This is a careful revision of the author's 1995 University of Connecticut doctoral dissertation.

In it, Boskovic applies recent minimalist concepts and mechanisms to a range of phenomena associated with infinitival complementation, attempting to eliminate stipulations associated with previous analyses. This research strategy is largely successful in reducing unnecessary aspects of phrase structure although it not unexpectedly comes with its own assumptions about what a grammar should look like, as well as the occasional unwanted stipulation. Nonetheless, the diversity of problems explored and the sophistication of its argumentation make this book an important contribution to minimalist syntactic theory, one that will in all likelihood become essential reading in the field at large.

Although versions of some of the material have been published elsewhere by B (especially sizable portions of Chs. 2 and 5 as Boskovic 1996 and 1995, respectively), this volume represents a signifi- cant amount of completely new and highly innovative work. After a brief introductory chapter, which sets the context for minimalism, B turns in Ch. 2, 'Selection and the categorial status of infini- tival complements', to some possible residual effects of c(ategorial)-selection, showing how they might be alternatively accommodated in s(emantic)-selection terms. Ch. 3, 'Wager-class verbs and French propositional infinitivals', deals with a particularly problematic set of noncanonical believe- class verbs. In Ch. 4, 'Existential constructions, A-movement, and infinitival complementation', B takes issue with various analyses of there constructions by both Chomsky and Lasnik, proposing a novel solution that exploits LF lowering of the expletive. Lastly, Ch. 5, 'Participle movement', treats the mechanisms governing the placement of verbal participles in Serbian/Croatian and, to a far lesser extent, Dutch and Polish. As this chapter strikes me as somewhat autonomous from the rest of the book, I will not discuss it further in this review.

I now turn to some of the more interesting highlights, and the issues they raise. A by now classic argument in the generative literature (but see Odijk 1997) concerns Pesetsky's (1982) demonstration that a theory of s-selection, properly supplemented by the diacritic ability of a verb to assign Case, can explain why predicates like ask can take NP or CP complements, whereas predicates like wonder can only take CP complements. B (8) points out that the traditional GB analysis of illegal taking a CP complement but appear taking an IP complement, in order to handle the data in 1, is problematic in that it requires c-selection as a lexical property. Additionally, it relies on the PRO theorem government approach to the distribution of PRO, an approach fraught with unwarranted assumptions.

(1) a. *Johni is illegal [cP ti to park here] b. It is illegal [cp PRO to park here] c. Johnj appears [IP ti to like Mary] d. *It appears to Bill [IP PRO to like Mary]

B therefore advances a version of Martin's (1994) modification of Chomsky and Lasnik's (1993) 'null case' theory of PRO, according to which a phonologically silent Case is checked by [ + tense, - finite] I under Spec-head agreement. This turns out to be a powerful explanatory device, able to accommodate diverse phenomena under a single rubric.

B's treatment of the paradigm in 1 can best be seen by comparing infinitival complements to the ECM verb believe and the control verb try, as in 2 and 3.

(2) a. John believedi [AgroP himj t, [,p tj to be crazy]] b. *John believed [IP PRO to be crazy]

(3) a. *John triedi [Agrop himj t, [cp [Ip tj to win]]] b. John tried [cp PRO to win]

Whereas, following Stowell (1982), believe s-selects a 'Proposition' complement which lacks tense features, try s-selects a nonpropositional 'Irrealis' complement which has a tense value independent from the matrix clause. Consequently, B argues that subjects of infinitival comple-

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ments to believe must get their case checked in the main clause SpecAgroP, implying in the spirit of Lasnik and Saito (1991) that ECM after believe-type verbs involves overt object shift, whereas subjects of infinitival complements to try are checked for null Case internal to their own clause. Once this move is made, many facts about these two verb classes fall into place, and it becomes unnecessary to stipulate that believe can only take an IP and try only a CP: 2b is impossible because PRO has no source for Case, and 3a is impossible because it involves movement from one Case-checking position (SpecIP) into another (SpecAgroP), in violation of the Last Resort Condition (a.k.a. "Greed").'

B (21) further argues that bare IP infinitivals are necessary to account for the judgments in (4).

(4) a. [cp Thatj*0 [he would buy a car]] was believed at that time b. [cp 0 [IP To buy a car]] was desirable at that time c. [IP To buy a car] was desirable at that time

Since 4a violates the ECP if complementizer that is not present, and that is required in noncomple- ment finite clauses so that (phonologically null) I also meet the ECP, the question arises of why 4b is grammatical. B concludes that this is because the subject infinitival must in fact be an IP, as in 4c; the ECP problem does not arise since (pronounced) to occupies I. Given the need to postulate bare IP control infinitivals, B proposes that, in the absence of explicit c-selectional requirements, there is also no reason why control infinitivals such as 3b should involve a CP rather than IP complement. He then adopts a 'minimal structure principle' (MSP) which limits the number of functional projections in a given representation to those actually motivated by that representation; in other words, if no C is required, then none is projected. This popular idea has all sorts of useful implications; for example, there are no that-trace effects in 5b because the embedded clause is not a CP (30).

(5) a. *Who, do you believe [cp that [IP t, likes Mary]]? b. Whoi do you believe [ip t, likes Mary]?

While I find no flaw in any of this reasoning, clarification of how the ECP and associated effects can be recast in minimalist terms would have been desirable.

B's view of the MSP has significant consequences for Chomsky's 1995 characterization of the numeration. B rightly points out that Chomsky's criterion that 'c enters the numeration only if it has an effect on output' is conceptually undesirable in its globality.2 He proposes instead that the numeration consists exclusively of lexical elements, and that subsequent access to the lexicon in order to merge functional categories (necessitated by features of associated lexical heads) has a cost, hence only applies when unavoidable. In this way, the MSP derives from the Last Resort Condition.

B develops very interesting extensions of the MSP approach to problems in ASL, Romanian and, in the next chapter, French. If the ASL sign FEEL takes a CP but THINK takes an IP, the contrasts in 6 vs. 7 follow:

wh-q (6) a. ?*WHO YOU FEEL [JOHN LIKE t]

wh-q b. WHO YOU THINK [RAY LIKE t]

__t (7) a. BILL FEEL [cp [IP JOHN [IP MARY LIKE t]]]

__t b. *BILL THINK [IP JOHN [IP MARY LIKE t]]

B (32) argues that wh-movement in 6a but not 6b violates subjacency and that embedded topicali- zation is possible in 7a but not 7b, since there it would involve adjunction to an argument.

l Since be illegal vs. appear in (1) satisfy the same set of diagnostics adduced by B, the same sort of Irrealis vs. Propositional s-selection account should suffice here as well, with the difference being that these predicates do not 0-mark their subjects.

2 See Collins 1997 for an alternative, local economy solution to this problem.

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LANGUAGE, VOLUME 75, NUMBER 2 (1999)

Although these data are consistent, and 7a can be taken as positive evidence that FEEL requires a CP complement, I nonetheless wondered how this lexical fact could be stated in other than c- selectional terms. The same conceptual problem arises in Ch. 3, where it is proposed that French croire 'believe' takes an infinitival CP complement in order to explain differences it displays from its English gloss.

Ch. 4 tackles expletive there constructions. B critiques Chomsky's (1993) 'expletive replace- ment' and 1995 'formal feature movement' analyses of there, showing them to be technically unworkable; especially valuable is his probing discussion (92-104) of feature movement analy- ses. With Lasnik (1995), B concludes that be is a (partitive) case assigner, and with Chomsky (1993) he concludes that the relevant movement is driven by Greed. B (83) proposes, however, that this movement indeed involves a deficiency of there, hence it is actually LF lowering of there to the associate, rather than the opposite, as in all other accounts. This innovation explains more straightforwardly than alternatives the fact that the associate necessarily has in situ scope and binding properties. B (87-89) also neatly handles the first conjunct agreement facts discussed by Sobin (1994, 1997), since under B's analysis there in 8 is expected to lower in LF to the closest partitive NP.

(8) a. There is/*are a man and five women in the house. b. There *is/are four men and a woman in the house.

The shortest move is thus to the first (and structurally higher) conjunct. In this review I have only had space to mention a few of the ideas considered by Boskovic.

There are numerous other aspects of B's analyses which warrant serious discussion, such as the role agentivity plays in his theory, the status of the extended projection principle and the inverse case filter, or the interaction of overt object shift and procrastinate, and all sorts of curious pieces of language data which B is able to shed new light on. In attempting to come to grips with the central conceptual issues raised in the name of minimalism, this book is a milestone exercise in syntactic argumentation. As such, it is a volume which surely belongs on every syntactician's minimalist reading list.

REFERENCES BOSKOVIC, ZELJKO. 1995. Participle movement and second position cliticization in Serbo-Croatian. Lingua

96.245-66. .1996. Selection and the categorial status of infinitival complementation. Natural Language and Linguis- tic Theory 14.269-304.

CHOMSKY. NOAM. 1993. A minimalist program for linguistic theory. The view from building 20: Essays in linguistics in honor of Sylvain Bromberger, ed. by Ken Hale and Samuel J. Keyser, 1-52. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. . 1995. Categories and transformations. The minimalist program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. , and HOWARD LASNIK. 1993. The theory of principles and parameters. Syntax: An international handbook of contemporary research, ed. by Joachim Jacobs, Arnim von Stechow, Wolfgang Sternefeld, and Theo Vennemann, 506-69. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

COLLINS, CHRIS. 1997. Local economy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. LASNIK, HOWARD. 1995. Case and expletives revisited: On Greed and other human failings. Linguistic Inquiry

26.615-33. , and MAMORU SAITO. 1991. On the subject of infinitives. Papers from the 27th regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, ed. by Lise Dobrin, Lynn Nichols, and Rosa Rodriguez, 324-43. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.

MARTIN, ROGER. 1994. Null case and the distribution of PRO. Storrs: University of Connecticut, MS. ODIJK, JAN. 1997. C-selection and s-selection. Linguistic Inquiry 28.365-71. PESETSKY, DAVID. 1982. Paths and categories. Cambridge, MA: MIT dissertation. SOBIN, NICHOLAS. 1994. Non-local agreement, Little Rock: University of Arkansas.

.1997. Agreement, default rules, and grammatical viruses. Linguistic Inquiry 28.318-43. STOWELL, TIM. 1982. The tense of infinitives. Linguistic Inquiry 13.561-70. Department of Linguistics Indiana University 322 Memorial Hall Bloomington, IN 47405

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Article Contentsp. 368p. 369p. 370

Issue Table of ContentsLanguage, Vol. 75, No. 2, Jun., 1999Front MatterExplaining Article-Possessor Complementarity: Economic Motivation in Noun Phrase Syntax [pp. 227 - 243]Processing Complexity and Filler-Gap Dependencies across Grammars [pp. 244 - 285]Revisiting Tungusic Classification from the Bottom up: A Comparison of Evenki and Oroqen [pp. 286 - 321]The Grammaticalization of the Proximative in Tok Pisin [pp. 322 - 346]Discussion NotesOn the Origin of Hawaiian Creole English: A Rejoinder to Roberts [pp. 347 - 349]Response to Goodman [pp. 349 - 351]

Reviewsuntitled [pp. 352 - 354]untitled [pp. 354 - 357]untitled [pp. 357 - 360]untitled [pp. 360 - 362]untitled [pp. 362 - 365]untitled [pp. 365 - 367]untitled [pp. 368 - 370]untitled [pp. 371 - 372]untitled [pp. 373 - 375]untitled [pp. 375 - 378]untitled [pp. 378 - 380]

Book Noticesuntitled [p. 381]untitled [pp. 381 - 382]untitled [pp. 382 - 383]untitled [p. 383]untitled [pp. 383 - 384]untitled [pp. 384 - 385]untitled [pp. 385 - 386]untitled [pp. 386 - 387]untitled [p. 387]untitled [pp. 387 - 388]untitled [pp. 388 - 389]untitled [p. 389]untitled [pp. 389 - 390]untitled [pp. 390 - 392]untitled [p. 392]untitled [pp. 392 - 393]untitled [p. 393]untitled [p. 394]untitled [pp. 394 - 395]untitled [pp. 395 - 396]untitled [pp. 396 - 397]untitled [p. 397]untitled [pp. 397 - 398]untitled [p. 398]untitled [pp. 398 - 399]untitled [pp. 399 - 400]untitled [pp. 400 - 401]untitled [pp. 401 - 402]untitled [p. 402]untitled [pp. 402 - 403]untitled [pp. 403 - 404]untitled [p. 404]untitled [pp. 404 - 405]untitled [pp. 405 - 406]untitled [p. 406]untitled [pp. 406 - 407]untitled [pp. 407 - 408]untitled [pp. 408 - 409]untitled [pp. 409 - 410]untitled [pp. 410 - 411]untitled [p. 411]

The Editor's Department [pp. 412 - 416]Correction: The Origins of Consonant-Vowel Metathesis [p. 416]Publications Received [pp. 417 - 421]Back Matter