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This volume brings together twelve original articles on adverbials in Hungarian, the prime outcome of a three-year project at the Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (financed by the Hungarian research found, OTKA). The book's main goal is to investigate the syntactic and semantic behaviour of adverbs and adverbial adjunct constituents. In line with the book's title (and the series in which it appears), special attention is dedicated to syntax and its interfaces with PF (Phonetic Form) and LF (Logical Form). The majority of the articles in this volume specify the extent to which the syntactic distribution of adverbs is determined by the requirements imposed upon syntax by demands of semantics and, in a few cases, by prosody.
In my view, the book succeeds excellently in covering the entire descriptive array of facts about adverbs and a sizeable portion of other adverbial expressions, together with numerous aspects of their theoretical analysis. The volume presents the reader with a comprehensive (and up-to-date) view of the topic, which is especially welcome in the light of the fact that very little has been published in this domain to date. The rounded picture that emerges is also due to the uniformity of theoretical assumptions adopted throughout: most of the articles work with the exact same set of background assumptions concerning the syntactic structure of the Hungarian clause and the theory of adverbial modification, which is very fortunate and reader-friendly when it comes to a multi-authored book of this size. The most important of these shared assumptions, namely the theoretical framework of Ernst (2002) (as opposed to that of Cinque 1999) for adverbs, is spelled out in the editor's 'Introduction'. In Cinque's theory, adverbs are universally specifiers in a rigidly ordered set of functional heads, while in Ernst's approach, adverbs merge to positions that match their (lexically specified) selectional needs - the latter can refer to events, propositions, times, and predicates. The order of adverbials that adjoin at the same level is determined via a calculus that is based on a hierarchy of events, propositions and speech acts. The calculus allows any type to be freely converted to any higher type, such that an event can be converted to a...