Current Issues in Generative Grammar: Papers from the 10th Colloquium on Generative Grammar, Universidad de Alcala, April 12-14 2000 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Current issues in generative grammar: Papers from the 10th Colloquium on Generative Grammar, Universidad de Alcalá, April 12–14 2000 ed. by Manuel Leonetti, Olga Fernández Soriano, and Victoria Escandell Vidal Iván Ortega-Santos Current issues in generative grammar: Papers from the 10th Colloquium on Generative Grammar, Universidad de Alcalá, April 12–14 2000. Ed. by Manuel Leonetti, Olga Fernández Soriano, and Victoria Escandell Vidal. Madrid: Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, 2002. Pp. 283. ISBN 8481385247. The proceedings of the 10th Colloquium on Generative Grammar, held at the University of Alcalá (Spain) in April 2000, consist of thirteen papers that focus mainly on syntax and semantics, though morphology has some presence. The data are mostly from Romance languages, but Basque, Saramaccan, German, and English are discussed as well. Several contributors focus on various topics in syntax, including merge as driven by c-selectional [End Page 1012] and intrinsic features of lexical items (Heles Contreras and Pascual José Masullo), a phase-based account of a reversed subject-object asymmetry with regard to extraction in French (Frank Drijkoningen), Spanish as a strong EPP language (Grant Goodall), a uniform account of postnominal and prenominal adjectives in Germanic and Romance as maximal projections in the specifier of NP (Enrique Mallén), nominal attributive constructions in Spanish analyzed as small clauses involving dislocation of the predicate (Analía G. García and José Luis Méndez), and the complementizer layer in Saramaccan, a creole language spoken in Suriname, taken as evidence in support of Luigi Rizzi’s analysis of the left periphery (Federico Damonte). In addition, some papers focus on the syntax-semantics interface, such as M. Teresa Espinal’s research on the limit between idiomatic constructions and light verb constructions, Joan Rafel’s analysis of bare infinitives as involving the same syntactic analysis but different semantics in perception and causative sentences, and Teresa María Rodríguez Ramalle’s discussion of nonagreeing adjectives functioning as adverbial modifiers in Spanish. A variety of issues in semantics are presented as well. In particular, Jaume Mateu Fontanals focuses on the relational semantics of transitive denominal verbs and suggests that both locative and locatum verbs are to be regarded as causative change-of-state verbs whose telicity is determined by the presence of the abstract terminal coincidence relation. An account of the semantic widening of underspecified WH-elements in terms of their initially unmarked semantic specification is offered by Nicola Murano and Hans-Georg Obenauer. Finally, Isabel Pérez Jiménez and Norberto Moreno Quibén explore the semantic interpretations of Spanish bare plural noun phrases in object position, arguing that they are open formulas that introduce a free variable in the logical representation of the sentence. In the only morphology-focused paper, Francesc Roca and Teresa Vallverdú develop a morphophonological analysis of nominal affixes in Basque in terms of optimality theory. As a whole, this volume provides a good overview of the state of the art in generative grammar. Iván Ortega-Santos University of Maryland Copyright © 2005 Linguistic Society of America