Svenonius Peter (Ed.). Functional Structure from Top to Toe: The Cartography of Syntactic Structures: Volume 9

Oxford University Press, 2014. — 336 p. — (Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax).This book is a Festschrift for Tarald Taraldsen. It consists of nine chapters on central issues in theoretical comparative syntax. The first three chapters deal with subject extraction, null subjects, the que/qui alternation, and relative clause formation. One chapter presents arguments that subjects are “criterial” and that subject extraction is highly restricted. The next chapter concurs, suggesting that what appears to be subject extraction in French has been misanalyzed, and involves a relative structure. Chapter 3 shows that children avoid using object relatives, preferring subject relatives, even when it requires passivization. Chapter 4 analyzes the loss of pro-drop in the history of French and Brazilian Portuguese. The next two chapters present novel analyses of complementizers, suggesting that they are essentially nominal, rather than verbal. The last three chapters address the relationship of morphology to syntax. The first two argue for a syntactic approach to word formation, one in a typological context, and the other within an analysis of Finnish focus constructions. The final chapter presents an argument for the limitations of the syntactic approach to word formation.