Marcel den Dikken & Hideki Kishimoto (eds.): Formal Perspectives on Secondary Predication

The linguistic phenomenon generally known as secondary predication has attracted the attention of countless scholars, thus, it has been the subject of thorough investigation over the last few decades, occupying a prominent place in linguistic theory, and raising important questions for (morpho)syntax, (lexical) semantics, argument structure or event structure.Moreover, secondary predicate constructions have been the focus of much research from the perspective of both Generative Grammar and Construction Grammar.Consequently, the question arises as to whether an international symposium on this broad topic can still bring together researchers who focus on the problematic or still unexplored aspects of these structures and who can present a cutting-edge perspective on this topic of central interest in the field.Another question that naturally arises is whether an edited volume containing the earlier versions of the papers presented at such an event would still be of interest to linguists and scholars working on this topic.As demonstrated by the chapters included in the volume under review here, there are still some prominent and debatable predication issues that raise important syntactic or semantic questions cross-linguistically.This is the most recent volume in and addition to The Mouton-NINJAL Library of Linguistics series of scholarly monographs and collections, which publishes in English on Japanese linguistics and its related fields.As is evident from the chapters included in this volume, the research results summarized here go beyond Japanese, as secondary predication is an intense topic from a cross-linguistic perspective.The book is divided into eleven chapters, which are preceded by Series preface, Preface, Contents and Contributors.The introductory chapter (Formal perspectives on secondary predication -An introduction, pp.1-16), authored by the two editors of the volume, provides a brief overview of the development of formal approaches to secondary predication.As the main target of investigation is secondary predication, it is impossible not to mention at this point Hallidays (1967) feature called attributive, which must be specified as a system of two contrasting features: depictive (eat the meat raw) and resultative (hammer the metal flat).This chapter also introduces and discusses the most relevant predication issues of the individual chapters, summarizes the contributions of the present volume, justifies the order in which these contributions are included in the volume and lays out some new lines of research connected to each of the contributions.The next chapter, The syntax and semantics of indirect predication in French (pp.17-49), by Lieven Danckaert and Fayssal Tayalati, concerns two, seemingly unrelated and dissimilar constructions from modern French, but which turn out to be unifiable, to a certain extent, precisely Imola-gnes Farkas: