J. Linguistics 59 (2023), 459–463. © The Author(s), 2023.
Published by Cambridge University Pressdoi:10.1017/S0022226723000026

BOOK REVIEW
Shigeru Miyagawa, Syntax in the treetops (Linguistic Inquiry Monographs).
Cambridge, MA & London: MIT Press, 2022. Pp. xviii þ 234.
Reviewed by NICHOLAS CATASSO, Bergische Universität Wuppertal

The syntax of the leftmost domain(s) of the clause and its interplay with discourse,
the speaker’s coordinates, and those of the world in which a proposition is uttered orinterpreted have been the focus of an immense amount of linguistic research in thelast decades, in particular since Rizzi’s (1997) seminal paper on the ﬁne structure of
the CP. Some of the questions that have maintained the interest of the scientiﬁccommunity to date, and still have not been answered in a unitary way, include
whether – and if so, to what extent – the makeup of the left periphery can be assumed
to be cross-linguistically stable; what formal mechanisms (e.g. Move and Merge)lead to linearizations in this domain and how the projections situated there, whether
they are positioned intra- or extrasententially, determine the licensing of thephenomena overtly realized in the clause; and how the interaction of syntax,
pragmatics, and semantics can be eﬀectively explained in a formal model.
Shigeru Miyagawa’s monograph Syntax in the treetops is an excellent andmuch-needed attempt to shed light on some of these long-burning issues. Looking
at data from Japanese and other languages, the author explores the very role ofsyntax in connecting the contextual features and the semantics of an utterance,
proceeding from the assumption that this module ‘provides the basic frameworkthat makes the performance of a speech act and the conveyance of meaning
possible’ (x). In particular, Miyagawa assumes with Krifka (2014) that therealization of any speech act involves the presence and activation of given ‘actors’(at least a speaker and a hearer) endowed with given linguistic attitudes andcorrelates (an intention, the capacity to use language in a persuasive way, etc.) andthat these factors are represented in the syntax, speciﬁcally in the left periphery.
The explicit objective of this work is to demonstrate (and provide empiricalevidence for) the existence of dedicated projections for the encoding of thesecoordinates in the left domain of the clause and to show how they work andcorrelate with syntactic phenomena.
Miyagawa’s monograph is organized in six chapters preceded by a foreword,preface, and list of abbreviations. The last chapter is followed by thesection ‘Notes’, the references, a name index, and a subject index (234 pages intotal).
In Chapter 1 (‘Setting the stage’, 1–36), the author discusses the notion of ‘root(clause)’ and its implications for the representation of speaker and addressee in the459

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226723000026 Published online by Cambridge University Press

JOURNAL OF LINGUISTICS

syntax. He starts from Emonds’ (1970) deﬁnition of a root as a universal phonetically unrealized superordinate structure, which contains the speaker, the addressee,
and a so-called ‘performative predicate’ (the latter being problematic for a numberof reasons, as discussed in 1.2.2). As Miyagawa points out referring to recent workby Frey & Meinunger (2019), this term has come to identify at least three types ofphenomena variously labeled in the literature: (i) strongly root-sensitive phenomena, exclusively licensed in genuine main clauses (i.e. propositions realizing fullyﬂedged illocutionary acts), like hanging topicalization; (ii) weakly root-sensitive
phenomena, licit in main and a restricted class of subordinate clauses, such as modal
particles, and; (iii) phenomena that do not exhibit any root sensitivity whatsoever,e.g. right dislocation. In the following sections, the author presents selected crosslinguistic arguments from the literature of the last three decades in favor of a formal
representation of the speaker’s and/or the addressee’s deictic coordinates in thesyntactic structure: logophoricity in some African and native American languages,
but also in English, where this feature is externalized by self-pronouns; allocutive
agreement in Basque; sentential particles in Romanian; and temporal coordinates inEnglish and Italian. Miyagawa then goes on to set the agenda for the following partsof the monograph: he will propose a revision of Krifka’s (2014) multi-layered
model of the representation of speaker and addressee in the clausal architecture(1a) (in which, from bottom to top, the TP contains the clause with its truth value,
JudgP encodes the speaker’s own attitude towards the proposition, CommitP isrelated to their liability for the content expressed in the utterance, and ActP is thelocus of illocutionary force) as (1b) (where ActP is replaced by a revised version ofHaegeman & Hill’s (2014) – originally Speas & Tenny’s (2003) – saP, which in turn
contains the speaker’s and the interlocutor’s features, and JudgP is integrated into
Rizzi’s (1997) Split CP).
(1)a. ActPb. SAP

CommitP

CommitP

JudgPCP
TP(Krifka’s model)(Miyagawa’s model)

In the last part, the author delineates the argumentation developed in each of thefollowing chapters. Even though the premises made in this chapter are very clear
and well presented, I ﬁnd the choice of labeling the highest projection ‘S(peaker-)A(ddressee)P’ strategically less than optimal, especially because it is explicitly
claimed to replace an (uncapitalized) ‘s(peech)a(ct)P’, to which a formally almost
identical acronym corresponds. This is even more confusing since Haegeman &Hill (2014) ADDITIONALLY propose a (capitalized) ‘SAP’ that is assumed to460

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226723000026 Published online by Cambridge University Press

BOOK REVIEW

structurally dominate saP. Irrespective of whether this was a conscious ‘conservative’ decision or not, any other label – or just leaving the acronym and its correlates‘untouched’ – would have been in my view more eﬀective.
In Chapter 2 (‘The SAP and the politeness ϕ-feature’, 37–88), Miyagawa
provides a substantial amount of evidence, mainly from Japanese (honoriﬁc aﬃxes-mas- and -des-), but also in a comparative perspective with Basque, Magahi,Korean, Thai, and Tamil, supporting the idea that the addressee is syntactically
represented in SAP. In a nutshell, the author proposes, on the basis of the function
and syntactic position of -mas-, that the allocutive ϕ-feature, which this element
overtly lexicalizes, begins in a low position between negation and the vP (where-mas- is obligatorily spelled out) and automatically moves all the way up to SAP via
every head on the way, thereby providing additional evidence for head-to-head
movement.
Chapter 3 (‘The SAP, CommitP, and sentence ﬁnal particles’, 89–126) investigates structures involving the CommitP layer. The author convincingly shows thatin Japanese, the sentence-ﬁnal particles ne and yo are to be conceived as lexicalizations of the A(ddressee)-component of SAP and CommitP, respectively. The
former, indeed, is used to ask for conﬁrmation of a claim, while the latter expresses
certainty and seems to behave like a German modal particle (e.g. Hanako-wa
ki-mas-u ne?/yo!, lit. Hanako-top come-hon-prs ne/yo, ‘Hanako will come,right?’/Hanako will come!, 110). The two particles can co-occur in one and thesame sentence, but only in the order yo > ne, which suggests that they are situated in
diﬀerent loci that Miyagawa identiﬁes with the two above-mentioned projections –given the structure in (1b): ([SAP ne [CommitP yo [CP]]]).
In Chapter 4 (‘Is the judgment phrase needed? A view from topicalization’, 127–162), Miyagawa discusses comparative data concerning the relation between theinformation-structural status and the syntactic position of topics in English,
German, Japanese, and Spanish and argues against JudgP as part of the clausal
spine of languages; in particular, he contends that what other authors (Krifka(2014), but also Frey & Meinunger (2019) in relation to weakly and strongly
root-sensitive topicalization in German) call ‘JudgP’ is not a permanent,
i.e. universal and always present, projection but rather an ‘occasional’ position
found in some contexts of some languages, which is better included into anextended C-domain à la Rizzi (1997).
Chapter 5 (‘Questions and the commitment phrase’, 163–195) is devoted to therelation between the intermediate treetop projection CommitP assumed by theauthor and (the expressive component of) interrogativity, in particular to the issueof what exactly is being committed by whom when a question is asked. Miyagawa
concludes that in an interrogative question, ‘the speaker commits to the goal of
having the addressee commit to p, while the addressee commits to (some sort of) p’(195). On the basis of the syntactic behavior and semanto-pragmatic properties of
the Japanese question particle no, exhaustivity (which is part of the commitmentdomain) is contended not to be automatically included in the expressive componentof questions but rather to instantiate a feature that needs to be overtly realized by/in461

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226723000026 Published online by Cambridge University Press

JOURNAL OF LINGUISTICS

the C-area. Miyagawa argues that exhaustivity and non-exhaustivity do not require
two diﬀerent commitments. Interestingly, the data discussed in this chapter arestrongly reminiscent of one hitherto neglected particle of German (one special typeof fully optional middle-ﬁeld so) that in fact seems to play a similar role as Japaneseno, but ‘the other way round’: questions in general, which in German do not involve
any particular particle, can be interpreted, depending on the context and on anumber of other factors, as exhaustivity- or non-exhaustivity-oriented, but when
the particle so does surface in the clause, the sentence is read as requiring some kindof non-exhaustive answer, as exemplarily illustrated in (2), which also shows thatso, just like no, is apparently licit in any wh-context, but does not seem to be ideallycompatible with why-questions (191):(2) a. Was hast duso gemacht?
what have you so done
‘What did you do? [non-exhaustive]’b. Wer war so auf der Party?
who was so atthe party‘Who was at the party? [non-exhaustive]’c. ??Warum gehst du so?
whygoyou so(int.:) ‘Why are you leaving? [non-exhaustive]’
Assuming that so is a (modal) particle and admitting the existence of a leftperipheral projection responsible for licensing it (cf. e.g. Coniglio 2011), theoptionality of this element can be taken to suggest that at least in German (andperhaps diﬀerently from Japanese), even NON-exhaustivity requires overt marking
under speciﬁc conditions. This would imply, then, that it cannot be excluded that insome language and under certain premises, exhaustivity and non-exhaustivity may
correspond to distinct mechanisms and diﬀerent technical implementations. Thisobservation could pave the way for further investigations from a comparative
perspective.
Chapter 6 (‘Concluding thoughts: the uniqueness of human language’, 197–200)
reiterates the focus, objectives, research questions, and major ﬁndings of the treatiseand brieﬂy discusses them in relation to each other. In a last note (199–200), theauthor underlines the exceptional nature of human language as opposed to thecommunication systems of other animals, whose core – at least with respect to thiswork’s topic – he identiﬁes in the existence of the projection CommitP.
Miyagawa’s monograph is a compelling, very well-written, and extremely
insightful look at the syntax-discourse interface from a generative perspective.
The structure of the book, in particular the sequence of the chapters, is well thought
out and eﬀectively leads the reader through the author’s argumentation, which isbuilt in a coherent manner and systematically embedded in the ongoing discussions
on the relation between grammar and semanto-pragmatics in the literature. I ﬁnd theidea of repeating the proposed makeup of the left periphery for the reader’s462

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226723000026 Published online by Cambridge University Press

BOOK REVIEW

convenience very appealing – and helpful, in order to recapitulate the points made in
the previous chapters, in case the book is not read in full, but selectively.
For the reasons elucidated above, this monograph not only is a brilliant contribution to the research but can also be fruitfully employed as a resource for teaching
syntax at the graduate level.
REFERENCES
Coniglio, Marco. 2011. Die Syntax der deutschen Modalpartikeln: Ihre Distribution und Lizenzierung in
Haupt- und Nebensätzen. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
Emonds, Joseph. 1970. Root and structure-preserving transformations. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT.
Frey, Werner & André Meinunger. 2019. Topic marking and illocutionary force. In Valéria Molnár,
Verner Egerland & Susanne Winkler (eds.), Architecture of topic, 95–138. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Haegeman, Liliane & Virginia Hill. 2014. The syntactization of discourse. In Raﬀaella Folli, Christina
Sevdali & Robert Truswell (eds.), Syntax and its limits, 370–390. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Krifka, Manfred. 2014. Embedding illocutionary acts. In Tom Roeper & Margaret Speas (eds.),
Recursion: Complexity in cognition, 125–155. Heidelberg: Springer.
Rizzi, Luigi. 1997. The ﬁne structure of the left periphery. In Liliane Haegeman (ed.), Elements ofgrammar: A handbook of Generative Syntax, 281–337. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Speas, Margaret & Carole Tenny. 2003. Conﬁgurational properties of point of view roles. In Anna MariaDi Sciullo (ed.), Asymmetry in grammar. Syntax and semantics, 315–344. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Author’s address:

Fakultät für Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften,
Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Gaußstraße 20 42119, Room O.08.31,Wuppertal, Germanycatasso@uni-wuppertal.de463

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226723000026 Published online by Cambridge University Press