Complex Predicates

Complex predicates present different levels of complexity at the syntactic and morphological levels crosslinguistically. The focus of this book is a subset of these constructions (causative and applicative) in three polysynthetic languages of the South Caucasian language family, in which the functional morphology associated with the argument structure of these constructions is unusually rich. Due to such focus, the syntax-morphology interface in causative and applicative constructions is subject to scrutiny in two main chapters of the book. The analysis includes the argument structure of causatives and applicatives along with the morpho-phonological instantiation of the functional heads involved in these constructions. The book is written very clearly and is accessible for a wide audience including undergraduate students in the introductory syntax and morphology courses as well as graduate students in basic syntax courses and seminars in linguistics. It naturally appeals to a general linguistic audience interested in theoretical linguistics.

Aroldo Andrade, State University of Campinas, on Linguist List 23.557, 2012:
This is a valuable book, for it includes a rich discussion on data from different Caucasian languages. The analysis of under-represented languages is always very welcome in generative linguistics, for it broadens the scope of the theories and at the same time it permits us to test these in typologically diverse systems. Another very interesting aspect of the book is the questioning of previous proposals, necessary to accomplish the challenge taken up by the author: to give a coherent formal account of complex predicates in Georgian, and to apply these ideas to Mengrelian and Svan, whenever possible.