Locality in minimalist syntax (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Locality in minimalist syntax Winfried Lechner Locality in minimalist syntax. By Thomas S. Stroik. (Linguistic inquiry monograph 51.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. Pp. x, 149. ISBN 9780262512763. $34. Some books are easy to form an opinion about, while others resist a simple judgment. Locality in minimalist syntax (LMS) by Thomas Stroik is a thought-provoking and refreshingly unorthodox study that definitely falls into the second category. And, as I try to show below, this is a good thing, since what S does is nothing less than offer an invitation to reconsider a number of fundamental, widely adopted assumptions about the architecture of the syntactic component by delineating parts of a theory of syntactic locality phenomena that represents an intriguing alternative to the standard minimalist model (Chomsky 1995, 2005). While various facets of this theory provide interesting new angles on long-standing problems, including case freezing effects, superraising, the boundedness of wh-movement, and that-trace phenomena, it is not unlikely that some of S’s suggestions, such as his particular view of features, will also be met with a certain amount of resistance. But as some of these more contentious issues touch upon significant theoretical decisions that are far from settled, LMS forces one to sharpen one’s position toward many standard assumptions, turning the reading experience into a challenging yet rewarding intellectual enterprise. In this sense, S’s book also succeeds in demonstrating that controversy is the single most effective stimulant for scientific progress. The theory outlined in LMS divides into three discrete subcomponents: (i) a theory of displacement, framed in terms of the survive principle, (ii) a theory of features, feature compatibility, and feature checking, and (iii) a particular view of the architecture of the syntactic component of the grammar. It is important to note that these three parts, which are presented in a heavily crosscutting fashion, are by and large independent of each other, even though they are sold as a package. One might, for instance, adopt S’s movement analysis without committing oneself to the specific featural implementation advocated in LMS. In itself, this modular interaction poses neither an advantage nor a disadvantage, unless one would hope for a deeper grounding of the subcomponents in a unified theory. Before discussing the content, it is necessary to get out of the way the only real, serious criticism of LMS that no reader will be able to evade—its form. To begin with, the book does not bear any visible sign of proofreading, as witnessed by an astounding number of typos (a random sample from the first half of the book: pp. 17, 48, and 53 contain three errors each and there are two on p. 54). Furthermore, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the material in the book could have been presented in a more reader-friendly way. Discussion of many central topics is not bundled in a single chapter, but distributed over various places, making it extremely difficult to obtain a comprehensive picture of S’s many complex proposals. Information about the feature composition of wh-phrases, for example, needs to be picked up from three different places (pp. 53, 75, and 87). The problem is compounded by poor proofreading: for instance, the same feature is referred to as [REF/] and [REF/WH] on the same page (85). These oversights will certainly be overcome by the author and MIT Press in future editions of LMS. LMS is structured into four chapters that quite extensively overlap and cross-cut in content. An introductory chapter on the architecture of the grammar (twenty-eight pages) is followed by two main chapters, Chs. 2 and 3, which condense the central theses in eighty-eight pages. The book [End Page 234] ends with a conclusion (twelve pages). In this review, I briefly outline what I take to be the main contributions of LMS, followed by some general remarks and comments. Unfortunately, the wealth of information conveyed in LMS makes it impossible to respond to all but a few of the many important issues addressed in this book. Questions pertaining to the architecture of the grammar (e.g. economy, the ontology of derivations, features, and movement) are...