The third chapter looks at attempts to replace global economy by local economy, a move that could help alleviate the computational problem. Johnson and Lappin show that the proposal made by Collins does away, by and large, with the economy approach as such and actually proposes local constraints, and that the proposal by Yang is empirically and formally inadequate in that it proposes a metric that leads to contradictory rankings. The authors then propose their own explicit account of raising and expletive constructions in an incremental correspondence model. In general, I sympathize with the authors' complaints about the lack of rigor and explicitness of syntactic work by the current followers of Chomsky. But I have to admit that to compare a fully developed mature theory, such as HPSG, to something that cannot be more than a sketch, such as minimalism, on the grounds of descriptive adequacy strikes me as a bit facile. The discussion, however, brings out some valuable points about the oddities of minimalist theory construction with respect to interprétable and noninterpretable features, a distinction that in a derivational approach needs to be made before the information to make it is available.

The fourth chapter discusses some if/z-constructions in Iranian Arabic, a language that has wfr-words both in sentence initial position and in situ. The HPSG account given seems adequate; minimalism as it stands seems to get into contradictions in the face of this set of facts. The authors do a good job in summarizing the main points of the HPSG approach for those of us that might have some trouble keeping all the various features and their behavior straight.

In the last chapter, Johnson and Lappin address more-general issues. They point out that while Chomsky always stresses Universal Grammar as determined by biolog­ical properties of the brain, optimality of design as proposed in minimalism is rarely a characteristic of biological systems. This is a short chapter and it is rather anecdo­tal, but it raises important questions. The meager results of forty years of syntactic theory constructions by bright and enthusiastic practitioners lead one to suspect that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way the problem is being looked at: to assume that simplicity and parsimony are part of universal grammar might just be misguided. A degree of redundancy and independence of subparts might be the necessary characteristics of a robust and continuously evolving system such as language, and theories such as minimalism might be more harmful because they are philosophically misguided than because they are descriptively inadequate.