Complex Predicates: The syntax-morphology interface(174 Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today)

Complex predicates present different levels of complexity at the syntactic and morphological levels crosslinguistically. The focus of this book is a subset of these constructions (causative and applicative) in three polysynthetic languages of the South Caucasian language family, in which the functional morphology associated with the argument structure of these constructions is unusually rich. Due to such focus, the syntax-morphology interface in causative and applicative constructions is subject to scrutiny in two main chapters of the book. The analysis includes the argument structure of causatives and applicatives along with the morpho-phonological instantiation of the functional heads involved in these constructions. The book is written very clearly and is accessible for a wide audience including undergraduate students in the introductory syntax and morphology courses as well as graduate students in basic syntax courses and seminars in linguistics. It naturally appeals to a general linguistic audience interested in theoretical linguistics.

Table of Contents:
1. Acknowledgements; 2. List of abbreviations and symbols; 3. Chapter 1. Preliminaries; 4. Chapter 2. The morphosyntax of causative alternations; 5. Chapter 3. Applicatives as complex predicates; 6. Chapter 4. Conclusions; 7. References; 8. Appendix A; 9. Index

Review :
This is a valuable book, for it includes a rich discussion on data from different Caucasian languages. The analysis of under-represented languages is always very welcome in generative linguistics, for it broadens the scope of the theories and at the same time it permits us to test these in typologically diverse systems. Another very interesting aspect of the book is the questioning of previous proposals, necessary to accomplish the challenge taken up by the author: to give a coherent formal account of complex predicates in Georgian, and to apply these ideas to Mengrelian and Svan, whenever possible. Lomashvili’s work focuses on the morphosyntax of complex predicate constructions in three polysynthetic languages of the South Caucasian language family: Georgian, Mengrelian, and Svan. The author concentrates on causative and applicative constructions in those languages. This volume is a valuable work that will fill an existing gap regarding an in depth analysis of complex predicates in those understudied languages. It provides interesting descriptive discussions and arrives at insightful theoretical results. Lomashvili provides an in-depth and insightful exploration of the argument structure and argument-structure-changing morphology of Georgian, including its highly productive causative and applicative forms. She provides new evidence concerning the selection and location of arguments, indluding a demonstration that Georgian unusually allows applicatives of unaccusative verbs. Lomashvili shows convincingly that even a morphologically intricate, polysynthetic language like Georgian shares its basic underlying syntactic structure with typologically very distinct languages, such as Spanish.