Review of Smuggling in Syntax, by Adriana Belletti and Chris Collins (Eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press

Abstract

This edited volume, Smuggling in Syntax, comprises eleven chapters which delineate a wide range of interesting applications of a smuggling approach in syntactic derivations cross-linguistically. The languages treated in this volume include the Germanic languages (English) and the Romance languages (French, Italian, and Northern Italian dialects). After summarising the contributions of different syntacticians to smuggling derivations in ten chapters, it is acknowledged that smuggling could be seen as a strategy for circumventing locality constraints on movement under the framework of the Minimalist Program, which is not only conducive to optimizing the process of syntactic derivation, but also in agreement with the economic principle of language. Though many derivations yielding smuggling need further investigation, this book indeed opens up a new perspective for the in-depth study of syntactic derivation.

Keywords

• smuggling
• syntactic derivations
• verbal chunks
• movement interaction
• locality constraints
• cross-linguistic perspective