Shigeru Miyagawa, Syntax in the treetops (Linguistic Inquiry Monographs). Cambridge, MA & London: MIT Press, 2022. Pp. xviii + 234.

Abstract

The syntax of the leftmost domain(s) of the clause and its interplay with discourse, the speaker’s coordinates, and those of the world in which a proposition is uttered or interpreted have been the focus of an immense amount of linguistic research in the last decades, in particular since Rizzi’s (1997) seminal paper on the fine structure of the CP. Some of the questions that have maintained the interest of the scientific community to date, and still have not been answered in a unitary way, include whether – and if so, towhat extent – themakeup of the left periphery can be assumed to be cross-linguistically stable; what formal mechanisms (e.g. Move and Merge) lead to linearizations in this domain and how the projections situated there, whether they are positioned intraor extrasententially, determine the licensing of the phenomena overtly realized in the clause; and how the interaction of syntax, pragmatics, and semantics can be effectively explained in a formal model. Shigeru Miyagawa’s monograph Syntax in the treetops is an excellent and much-needed attempt to shed light on some of these long-burning issues. Looking at data from Japanese and other languages, the author explores the very role of syntax in connecting the contextual features and the semantics of an utterance, proceeding from the assumption that this module ‘provides the basic framework that makes the performance of a speech act and the conveyance of meaning possible’ (x). In particular, Miyagawa assumes with Krifka (2014) that the realization of any speech act involves the presence and activation of given ‘actors’ (at least a speaker and a hearer) endowed with given linguistic attitudes and correlates (an intention, the capacity to use language in a persuasive way, etc.) and that these factors are represented in the syntax, specifically in the left periphery. The explicit objective of this work is to demonstrate (and provide empirical evidence for) the existence of dedicated projections for the encoding of these coordinates in the left domain of the clause and to show how they work and correlate with syntactic phenomena. Miyagawa’s monograph is organized in six chapters preceded by a foreword, preface, and list of abbreviations. The last chapter is followed by the section ‘Notes’, the references, a name index, and a subject index (234 pages in total). In Chapter 1 (‘Setting the stage’, 1–36), the author discusses the notion of ‘root (clause)’ and its implications for the representation of speaker and addressee in the