Verb clusters: A study of Hungarian, German and Dutch (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Verb clusters: A study of Hungarian, German and Dutch ed. by Katalin É. Kiss, Henk van Riemsdijk Hubert Haider Verb clusters: A study of Hungarian, German and Dutch. Ed. by Katalin É. Kiss and Henk van Riemsdijk. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004. Pp. vi, 514. ISBN 1588115070. $174 (Hb). This volume assembles fifteen contributions: a detailed introduction to verb clustering in Dutch, German, and Hungarian by the editors; two questionnaire studies on German and Hungarian clustering data by Susanne Wurmbrand and by Kriszta Szendröi and Ildikó Toth, respectively; a review of clustering theories by Jonathan David Bobaljik; two demonstrations by Michael Brody and by Edwin Williams of how to apply their theory to verb clustering; five papers with a primary focus on Hungarian by Szendröi, Anikó Csirmaz, Gabor Alberti, Csaba Olsvay, and Huba Bartos; and four papers that model clustering and clause union in a systematic comparative perspective (Hungarian, Dutch, German) by Peter Ackema, Marcel den Dikken, É. Kiss, and Tóth. Verb clustering still is an insufficiently understood syntactic phenomenon. From the perspective of English (or any other VO language), clustering constructions like those of West Germanic OV languages appear to be out of the ordinary. However, clustering is not a peculiarity of West Germanic. A non-Indo-European language like Hungarian displays clustering properties with virtually the same classes of verbs and with strikingly similar syntactic effects. In the past three decades, a great variety of different syntactic analyses have been designed to capture clustering and its manifold side effects. The predominant strategy has been a derivational one. Clustering is seen as the result of syntactic processes that operate on structures of verbal complementation, and in particular, on verbal projections that are complements of verbs. Various kinds of syntactic tools have been tried out: Verbs may raise out of their projection and adjoin to a higher verb or to a functional head, or verbal projections are emptied by removing everything except the verbal head, before they are moved, or a given complement structure is restructured by means of ‘reanalysis’. What these tools have in common is that they could be implemented in the grammar of any language. In other words, the various approaches remain silent on a crucial question: Why is clustering and clause union typologically restricted to OV languages and why should verbs cluster at all? A descriptively adequate clustering theory should take a stand on the appropriateness of the generalization that clustering correlates with head-final verbal projections (see Bobaljik’s paper [End Page 647] ‘Clustering theories’, 121–45; Haider 2003). Head-initial languages do not cluster the verbs of stacked verbal projections, but in OV languages, stacked head-final projections seem to generally cluster. For clustering properties of OV languages of different language families, see Sells 1990 on Korean and Japanese. The clustering symptoms involve at least the following properties: first, clustered verbs are a compact syntactic unit. The verbs are adjacent. Intervening nonverbal elements except for verbal particles and particle-like elements are ungrammatical. Second, if a language displays variable orders for nonfinite verbs in a sequence of verbal projections, the language is a clustering language. The first property is an indicator of the syntactic organization of a verb cluster. The second property, namely reordering variation, is a concomitant effect of head-final clustering. Head-final clusters may be partially, and in many cases optionally, turned into head-initial clusters. Consistently head-initial languages (i.e. VO languages and VSO languages) do not cluster, nor do they reorder nonfinite verbs of stacked verbal projections, VP-transparency phenomena notwithstanding (Roberts 1997). Hungarian is clustering but it is certainly not a standard VO language. According to É. Kiss 1987 and literature cited there, the Hungarian VP is ‘non-configurational’, that is, neither strictly head-final nor strictly head-initial. As noted in the introductory section (36), ‘typologists do tend to classify Hungarian as an OV language on the basis of various properties’. A third quality of clustering constructions is the clause union effect. The main evidence comes from elements that are...