Reviewed by: Economy and semantic interpretation by Danny Fox Kleanthes K. Grohmann Economy and semantic interpretation. By Danny Fox. (Linguistic inquiry monograph 35.) Cambridge: MIT Press & MITWPL, 2000. Pp. xii, 215. This study (Fox’s 1999 MIT dissertation) is an important contribution to the notion of ‘economy’ that plays a major role in recent work in linguistic theory, in which F argues that principles of economy determine the syntax-semantics interface, in particular the LF-structures needed for interpretation and how to get there. Ch. 1 is ‘An overview’ (1–15), summarizing each chapter and connecting the rich content of the work in a coherent fashion; the book is divided into two parts, one outlining the theory of scope economy, and one discussing binding-theoretic aspects of scope reconstruction. Part 1 deals with ‘Interpretation-sensitive economy’ and consists of three chapters in which F presents the main ingredients of his theory of economy and applies it to what he calls scopally- and binding-uninformative sentences. Ch. 2 discusses ‘Economy of scope’ (19–76), which revolves around the principle of scope economy: Scope-shifting operations cannot be semantically vacuous. A particular informative example is quantifier raising (QR), a covert operation without phonological effect. Given scope economy, QR must have a semantic effect such as reversing the scope of a universal and an existential quantifier (as in the ambiguous Every boy likes some girl). From this it follows that shifting the scope of two universal quantifiers (as in Every boy likes every girl) should not be permissible; for reasons of economy, then, we can eliminate some potential outputs. (F also discusses the other scope-shifting operation, quantifier lowering or reconstruction, under the same premise, and he considers ellipsis construction in depth, something he returns to in the next chapter.) Ch. 3 deals with ‘Asymmetries in ellipsis and the nature of accommodation’ (77–107). It takes the proposal from Ch. 2 further and discusses an asymmetry which suggests that scope economy is sensitive to ‘parallelism’ (the condition that two phonologically reduced sentences, as in ellipsis, have isomorphic LF-structures). F argues that the asymmetry observed with respect to the ellipsis scope generalization is only apparent. (The ellipsis scope generalization, discussed in Ch. 2, states that in an ellipsis/down stressing environment a scopally-uninformative sentence, such as Every boy likes every girl, will disambiguate a scopally-informative sentence in favor of surface scope.) While scope economy generally predicts scope disambiguation in both directions, indirect parallelism may obviate these effects. Ch. 4 discusses ‘Economy and variable binding’ (109–37). Following the discussion of scopally-uninformative structures in Chs. 2 and 3, F now investigates binding-uninformative sentences. He adopts Irene Heim’s ‘Rule H’ and compares it to the principle of scope economy (cf. I. Heim, Anaphora and semantic interpretation: A reinterpretation of Reinhart’s approach. SFS-Report-07-03, Universität Tübingen, 1993). F acknowledges, but leaves open, the global character of this unification. Part 2, ‘Binding theory and the representation of scope’, addresses the consequence that binding theory must apply at LF if it is to be used to study scope and strongly suggests that at least Condition C does so. It starts off with Ch. 5, ‘Condition C and scope reconstruction’ (141–72), in which F argues that Condition C is affected by scope reconstruction. Overt movement with Condition C obviation can only take place if the movement is not reconstructed for scope. Ch. 6 discusses ‘Economy and operator-variable formation’ (173–99). Considering antecedent-contained deletion constructions, F modifies the popular view that Condition C applies after QR (reasonable under the assumption that A’-movement in general cannot bleed Condition C). He offers an explicit operator-variable economy condition, relevant for the interpretation of A’-chains. F ends the study with a discussion of Condition A, which is affected by A’-movement. To recapitulate, this book is highly informative and as such extremely useful to anyone interested in the syntax-semantics interface and the role that economy plays in linguistic theory. The writing is at times dense and technical, but the argumentation is always clear, and repeated summaries facilitate understanding. Kleanthes K. Grohmann University of Stuttgart Copyright © 2002 Linguistic...
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Feb 18, 2011
Fábio Müller Guerrini + 1
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