<b>Working minimalism.</b> Ed. by Samuel David Epstein and Norbert Hornstein. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Pp. xviii, 353. Cloth $75.00, paper $30.00.

Reviewed by: Working minimalism ed. by Samuel David Epstein, Norbert Hornstein Asya Pereltsvaig Working minimalism. Ed. by Samuel David Epstein and Norbert Hornstein. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Pp. xviii, 353. Cloth $75.00, paper $30.00. The twelve essays in this book develop syntactic analyses along the lines of the minimalist program of Chomsky (The minimalist program, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). The aim of the book is to show how the guiding ideas of the minimalist program make it possible to build specific analyses of syntactic phenomena. This books deals with some long-standing empirical issues, such as multiple wh-fronting and quantifier interpretation, as well as with some theory-internal issues that derive from the minimalist outlook on grammar, including cyclicity and feature checking. Written by Epstein and Hornstein, the introduction sets the stage for the issues discussed in the essays by reviewing the main concerns of the minimalist program. The explicit goal of the minimalist program is to find the most economical theory of language that solves Plato’s problem of language acquisition. As E & H put it, ‘all things being equal. . . more is worse, fewer is better’. In this vein, the minimalist program restricts levels of representation to only two interfaces and movement to only that which is necessary to check off features illegible at these interfaces. Since features are a major driving force in minimalism, several of the essays in the book attempt to determine the inventory of features, their distribution, and whether they are interpretable. For example, Roger Martin argues that it is possible to account for the Extended Projection Principle facts by using only case features and therefore D-features can be eliminated altogether. This claim is further supported by Erich M. Groat’s essays on expletives. Norbert Hornstein argues against the existence of another kind of feature, namely Q-features that were previously used to account for quantifier interpretations. He proposes that the movement which accounts for case checking is enough to account for quantifier interpretations as well. Hisatsugu Kitahara eliminates yet another feature, *feature proposed by Chomsky and Lasnik to account for adjunct and argument extraction facts. Once again, he proposes that case theory alone can account for these extraction facts. The second part of the book discusses the role of cyclicity and shortest move conditions. Robert Freidin’s essay provides a historical background on the issue. Norvin Richards and Željko Bošković both focus on superiority effects in languages with multiple wh-fronting. The third part of the book is dedicated to the copy theory of movement. The paper by Howard Lasnik examines the workings of the move operation and the formation of argument chains with the assumption that traces of movement are copies of the moved elements. The paper by Jairo Nunes addresses the question of why traces are phonetically silent and attempts to relate this fact (simply stipulated in GB) to the linear correspondence axiom. Juan Uriagereka argues that spell-out is not a single level in derivation (as proposed by Chomsky 1995) but is rather a rule which can apply a number of times in the course of derivation. Amy Weinberg’s paper builds on Uriagereka’s proposal and shows that it has some attractive parsing implications. The concluding paper by Samuel David Epstein examines the nature of levels in syntax and suggests that principles of grammar might be deducible from the independently motivated transformational rules and their constrained mode of application. Asya Pereltsvaig McGill University Copyright © 2001 Linguistic Society of America

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