Leonard H. Babby: The syntax of argument structure

Abstract

In the book under review, Leonard Babby, an eminent linguist renowned for his influential work on many aspects of the syntax of Russian, presents an ingenious and sophisticated theory of morphosyntax stemming from his previous studies and in many important ways diverging from the current mainstream of generative grammar. While for most proponents of Government and Binding and Minimalist Program “argument structure” is either read off the semantic representation of predicates (as in, e.g., Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1995, 1998) or reduced to syntactic configurations (e.g., Borer 2005, Ramchand 2008), Babby argues for a view that argument structure is an autonomous module of grammar, and in fact the core one, from which syntactic representations are built, and which cannot be fully reduced to semantics. For Babby, argument structure is not just a static representation, but a dynamic component of language where various operations such as passivization, causativization, etc., apply, and which is crucial for the determination of the initial syntactic representation of clauses. Despite its explicit theory-constructing goals, the book is thoroughly empirically-oriented, presenting a number of in-depth case studies of Russian morphosyntax, such as the structure and syntax of “short” (SF) and “long” (LF) forms of adjectives, control of infinitives, participles and gerunds, and the predicate instrumental construction, each elucidating particular aspects of the theory. A reader, accustomed to associating the term “argument structure” with such issues as “unaccusativity,” “dative shift,” or “spray/load alternations,” might be surprised by Babby’s choice of subject matter. However, the book shows, and quite convincingly, that the phenomena Babby investigates can be elegantly and revealingly accounted for from the chosen perspective.