Catalan working papers in linguistics 1991 Ed. by Albert Branchadell,Blanca Palmada, JosepQuer, Francesc Roca, and JaumeSola (review)

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

BOOK NOTICES 599 rhetorical consequences of particular tropes and had drawn more heavily on current research in cognitive linguistics and in discourse analysis. Nevertheless, Metaphor and reason in judicial opinions opens the door on an interesting new area of study for linguists and linguistically-oriented critics. [Edwin Battistella, Wayne State College.] Catalan working papers in linguistics 1991. Ed. by Albert Branchadell , Blanca Palmada, Josep Quer, Francesc Roca, and Jaume Sola. Barcelona: Grup de Gramática Teórica, Universität Aut ónoma de Barcelona, 1991. Pp. 351. Cloth $49.50. This volume is a belated continuation of Estudis Gramaticals. a theoretical linguistics journal based in Catalunya which only published a single issue. CWPL 1991 contains 13 original articles , all by linguists (faculty members, graduates , and graduate students) associated with the Universität Autónoma de Barcelona. This university is the scene of an active theoretical linguistics research program, which is reflected in the selection of working papers. All contributions are in English, with abstracts in English and Catalan. Most of the papers employ data from Catalan, while Spanish and English data also appear throughout the volume. The most noteworthy feature of this volume is the polished nature of the bulk of the contributions, which offer well-argued conclusions as a welcome contrast to the rough and tentative nature of many working papers. Three of the articles deal with phonology, the most innovative being Joan Mascaró's 'Iberian spirantization and continuant spreading' (167-79). Rather than postulating the spread of [ + continuant] to account for the realization of Spanish voiced obstruents, Mascaré offers an account based entirely on physical attributes of phonation, principally rate of airflow. This is a promising alternative to rigidly binary abstract phonology, and has important implications for Romance phonology. Blanca Palmada & Pep Serra, in 'On the specification of coronals' (181-99), offer data from several Catalan dialects in support of the underspecification of coronal consonants in Catalan. This entails some revisions of feature geometry theory, including the possibility that a terminal feature be simultaneously linked to more than one articulator or major class node. María-Rosa Lloret's 'Moras or skeletal units?' (149-65) proposes that languages exhibit parametric variation between the mora and the syllable as phonological prime. The remaining papers deal with syntactic themes, mostly within the Government and Binding framework. The contributions range from brief notes to major articles embodying theoretical innovations. Among the latter group, four deserve special mention, given their wide applicability to English and Spanish syntax. 'On the functional properties of AGR', by Gemma Rigau (235-60), uses regional Catalan data to explore the possibility that [person] and [number ] function independently as syntactic licensers . Rigau claims that [person] assigns Nominative case, while [number] marks the most prominent argument of the predicate. This entails that agreement between the verb and an argument can occur even when the argument is not the structural subject. Maria Lluisa Herranz tackles a thorny problem of Romance syntax in 'Spanish absolute constructions and aspect' (75-128). These constructions take an extremely diverse range of predicates as head, share the property that the lexical NP behaving as subject must occur following the predicate, and present a challenge to theories of case assignment. Herranz demonstrates that the unifying feature among predicates in absolute constructions is an event argument, closely correlated with a [ + perfective] aspect. She postulates that the event argument projects an ASP node, whence an ASPP maximal projection, within which various raising processes combine to produce the s-structure configuration of absolute constructions . The analysis is elegant as far as it goes, but in the end the precise mechanism for nominative case assignment is left open, with several speculative possibilities sharing the concluding section. 'Burzio's generalization, binding theory and I-subjects,' by Jaume Sola i Pujols (261-300), attempts a new account of the cluster of syntactic properties found in many null-subject languages . By assuming VP-internal subjects (4Isubjects '). Sola i Pujols proposes that I-subjects are [-anaphoric] in pro-drop languages and [ + anaphoric] in non-pro-drop languages. It is assumed that, in all languages, subject AGR has to be able to display all relevant Ö-features; if 600 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 70, NUMBER 3 (1994) AGR0 itself cannot...