Exploring Interfaces

Abstract

The study of interfaces in a grammatical domain has been approached by many scholars at different periods. The book Exploring Interfaces explores major linguistic interface areas and brings all three strands of Zubizarreta’s research programmes together. Edited by Mónica Cabrera and José Camacho, this book is a valuable contribution of ten individual chapters that constitute the three main parts of the collection. One thing that makes the book particularly interesting is its selection of contributors as they represent ideas and studies from different universities and disciplines around the globe. Moreover, while some of the papers are single-authored, others are written in collaboration. Following Zubizarreta’s seminal work exploring the division of labour between syntax and the lexicon, the first part of the collection includes four individual chapters bound by a single idea of syntax-lexicon interface and argument structure. In her chapter entitled “The L2 acquisition of English anticausative structures by L1 Spanish speakers,” Mónica Cabrera (p. 16) investigates the role of grammatical transfer to acquire a structure at the lexico-syntax interface. The paper juxtaposes two main hypotheses, Full versus Developmentally Constrained Transfer hypotheses, that constitute the core of the whole collection. Unlike the first chapter that studies anticausative structures, chapter two deals with semantic-syntactic alteration of adjectival constructions, where Violeta Demonte focuses on the Sideward Movement Theory of Control. Built on the ideas of Zubizarreta and Oh, the third chapter of the volume by Roberto Mayoral Hernández engages with a general explanation of all unaccusative verbs in Spanish focusing on the distribution of the clitic with reflexive morphology that typically occurs with certain unaccusative verbs in this language. This chapter may be considered the most intriguing since it provides a uniform account for all unaccusative verbs in Spanish and analyzes the distribution of obligatory PPs and clitics. What makes the chapter particularly remarkable is that the author walks the reader through all the samples of unaccusative verbs in Spanish that imply a change of state/location or just a state. At the same time, the verbs are approached from the point of view of their use by speakers from all Spanish-speaking countries (pp. 79–80) which makes it possible to compare and contrast the frequency of their uses. Part one terminates with the fourth chapter written by Mythili Menon and Roumyana Pancheva. The authors study the degree of achievements derived from property-concept expressions of colour in Malayalam that behave differently from the degree achievements of colour in other languages, English being no exception. In the second part, “Syntax-Semantics Interface,” José Camacho reviews a set of negative idioms in Spanish by distinguishing three types of idiomatic expressions, mainly those that require syntactic negation, non-syntactic negation, and those that are licensed in a wider downward-entailing context. In contrast to the idioms study, Tania Ionin and Tatiana Luchkina provide experimental evidence on learners’ preferences of word order, contrastive prosody, and scope interpretation in the Russian language. That is another outstanding chapter of the collection that studies the Russian language from the generative perspective. It should be emphasised that the Russian language, and Slavic languages as a whole, have