John Frederick Bailyn's The syntax of Russian is part of the Cambridge Syntax Guides series, which aims ‘to make available to all linguists major findings, both descriptive and theoretical, which have emerged from the study of particular languages’ (iii). To date, this series contains guides on the syntax of languages as varied as Spanish, Hungarian, Chichewa, Icelandic, Chinese, and Arabic, among others. The current volume adds another language, well known for its complex morphosyntactic case patterns and relative freedom of word order. This book, like the other guides in the series, aims to be accessible to both descriptivists, who will find a wealth of Russian data, both well known and novel, and theoreticians, who will be able to see how Russian fits into an overall theory of comparative syntax. As such, this book will be an invaluable resource for researchers and students of syntactic theory, of Slavic linguistics, and of language typology. John Bailyn is just the right person to write such a book, as his work on various phenomena in Russian syntax, including genitive of quantification, scrambling, and double object constructions, to name just a few, is of crucial importance to the field.

The book begins in Part I, ‘Basic configurations’, with an overview of verbal and nominal constituents, followed by a survey of major clause types. Chapter 1, ‘Verbal phrases’, covers such issues as verbs and their arguments, selection and thematic relations, infinitival and other non-finite clauses, and extended verbal functional structure. Also included here is an all-too-brief overview of Russian verbal aspect, a notoriously complex issue, which would require a separate volume to do it justice. Chapter 2, ‘Nominal phrases’, starts with an outline of the basic structure of noun phrases, then introduces the Determiner Phrase (DP) Hypothesis in application to Russian, a highly controversial issue in Russian syntax, to which I return in more detail below. This chapter also includes a discussion of nominal arguments and extraction from nominals, and further discusses predicate nominals (which can occur either in the nominative or in the instrumental case, with interesting consequences for the syntax of copular clauses) before turning to adjectival phrases. Chapter 3 is dedicated to ‘Types of clauses’, including main and subordinate clause types, wh-questions and their distribution, small clauses (null-copula sentences), infinitives, and gerunds, as well as impersonal sentences.

Part II of the book, ‘Case’, is dedicated to a description of the rich morphological case system of Russian, including both fairly standard patterns familiar from other Indo-European languages and those peculiar to Russian. Chapter 4 is concerned with ‘Core cases of Russian case’, focusing on the nominative, accusative, and dative cases. Verb-phrase-internal asymmetries are considered as well. Chapter 5, ‘More cases of Russian case: Predicate instrumental, quantificational genitive and others…’, is dedicated to the more complex and idiosyncratic case phenomena of Russian (and related languages), such as the predicate instrumental (whose discussion is tied to the issues discussed earlier in the book, especially the sections on predicate nominals (Section 2.5) and small clauses, infinitives and gerunds (Section 3.4), the quantificational genitive and other instances of structural genitive case, as well as case marking on adverbials and in nominalizations.

The third and final part of the book,'Word order', is dedicated to the syntax of ‘free’ word order, for which Russian is famous. The two chapters in this part (Chapters 6 and 7) are concerned with ‘A descriptive overview of Russian word order’ and ‘Theoretical issues in Russian word order’, respectively. It is shown that freedom of word order is not to be confused with arbitrariness: evidence for a basic word order in Russian is reviewed, as are discourse effects on word order variation. Chapter 7 addresses the theoretical questions that have stirred the most debate in recent formal approaches to the syntax of Russian, especially the issue of whether or not word order variants are derived by movement, and if they are, what kind of movement it is and what motivates it.

Each chapter includes a helpful summary of the most important data points and the issues discussed. The book also includes a twenty-page list of references to work by other leading figures in Russian syntax, such as Leonard Babby, Željko Bošković, Steven Franks, Tracy Holloway King, James Lavine, Ora Matushansky, and Gilbert Rappaport, to name just a few. Overall, Bailyn strikes a good balance in describing his own work on Russian syntax and that of other scholars in the field. While one could complain that some phenomena in Russian syntax – for instance, sluicing – do not receive more attention, Bailyn, in my opinion, succeeds in focusing on those aspects of Russian syntax that not only have generated the most heated debates in the field of Russian linguistics but also relate in the most interesting ways to theoretical issues that preoccupy theoretical syntacticians in general. What is more, Bailyn manages to succinctly outline arguments for both sides of a complex issue, such as the DP Hypothesis, to which I turn next.

The structure of noun phrases in Russian – and in Slavic languages in general – has been hotly discussed for the last two decades, and I personally have dedicated much of my own work to examining this issue. Since Abney's (Reference Abney1987) seminal paper, the idea of an extended nominal domain that comprises functional projections such as DP and NumP (Number Phrase) has been applied to the syntax of many languages, including Germanic, Romance, and Semitic varieties. This question became particularly important in the mid-1990s in light of Longobardi's (Reference Pereltsvaig1994) work, which takes the DP to be the syntactic counterpart of argumenthood and to convey not only definiteness but also referentiality. That at least the DP layer is universal has also been assumed in a wide range of works discussing the semantics of noun phrases. However, most Slavic languages, including Russian, do not have articles. This basic fact and several other possibly related facts (some of which are mentioned below) have led some researchers to claim that Russian does not have a DP domain at all, and that apparent determiner elements are in fact adjectival in nature and do not constitute any need for postulating a DP domain. However, other scholars, myself included, have argued for the existence of the DP domain and other functional projections in Russian. Bailyn carefully reviews a number of arguments for the existence of DP in Russian, which are based on such elements as demonstratives, quantifiers like každyj ‘every’, possessive pronouns, and numerals, all of which are discussed in Section 2.2 (‘The DP Hypothesis’). For example, numerals such as pjat' ‘five’ have been argued to be distinct from (quantificational) nouns, from which they arose diachronically. As such, they need to be housed by a functional projection, such as NumP.

Phenomena such as nominal arguments, extraction out of nominals, and predicate nominals (all of which are addressed in Chapter 2), provide further, if indirect, evidence for a functional structure above the Noun Phrase (NP) in Russian. Bailyn's chapter would have benefited from at least a brief discussion of certain misleading or mistaken arguments against the DP domain in Russian, as outlined in Pereltsvaig (forthcoming). For example, one of the seemingly strongest arguments for the non-existence of the DP domain in Russian has been the availability of so-called Left Branch Extraction (LBE), which has been claimed to correlate with the non-existence of articles in a given language and therefore also with the non-existence of the DP domain. While Bailyn briefly mentions the LBE phenomenon in Russian in his section on predicate nominals (Section 2.4), he does not mention (i) that the correlation between LBE and the absence of articles has not been validated empirically; and (ii) that so-called LBE is not really extraction in a technical sense at all since it can cross certain islands, as shown in Pereltsvaig (Reference Pereltsvaig2008). The rest of Section 2.4 is dedicated to a discussion of arguments put forward by Gilbert Rappaport (see Rappaport 2001) for the existence of the DP domain, which are based on other extraction phenomena. Here and elsewhere throughout the volume, more cross-chapter references would have been desirable, as numerous phenomena are discussed in more than one chapter in connection with different issues.

Another topic where both cross-chapter references and a more careful consideration of the data presented in the previous literature would have improved readability and discussion is the alleged lack of superiority effects in multiple wh-questions, a phenomenon for which Slavic languages in general are well known. In multiple wh-fronting (MWF) languages, multiple wh-interrogatives require fronting of all wh-phrases (unlike English Who bought what?, where only one wh-phrase is fronted). It has been claimed in Bošković (Reference Bošković, Epstein and Hornstein1999, Reference Bošković, Elfner and Walkow2008) that article-less MWF languages, such as Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, Czech, Polish, and Ukrainian, do not show superiority effects: in these languages fronted wh-phrases are not subject to strict ordering constraints. Conversely, MWF languages with articles, such as Bulgarian and Macedonian (also Romanian, Basque, and Yiddish), do show superiority effects. This alleged correlation has been put forward as yet another argument for the lack of the DP domain in article-less languages like Russian, a fact that remains unmentioned in Bailyn's discussion in Chapter 2. More importantly, the claim that article-less MWF languages do not show superiority effects is factually incorrect, and Bailyn mentions this fact as well as the attendant discussion in the literature on the topic. What remains unmentioned, however, is that there exists a certain amount of inter-speaker variation (as is the case with many other phenomena in Russian syntax) concerning the acceptability of ‘whom–who’ questions in Russian. While Bailyn justifiably focuses his attention throughout the book on uncontested data, he does on occasion step onto the minefield of more problematic data, often without acknowledging it.

Overall, despite the minor flaws mentioned above, The syntax of Russian makes a significant contribution to the field of Russian language and linguistics and will serve as an important reference source for researchers and students alike. Among its particularly advantageous features are its fairly comprehensive scope, and the overall good balance between technical detail and accessibility. I can envisage this book being used as a text for an advanced undergraduate or graduate course on the structure of Russian (where it would need to be supplemented by another text or texts covering the sound system, basic morphology, etc.) or as a basic text or reference guide for a graduate seminar on the syntax of Russian. It could also be used in combination with another Cambridge Syntax guide (or several other guides) for a course in comparative syntax, especially if supplemented by primary literature discussing the phenomena in question.