Book review of "Functions at the left and right periphery" (Leiden: Brill, 2014)

What is it about?

This is a collection of nine contributions dealing with the behaviour of specific pragmatic or discourse markers that only occur at the periphery of a sentence or utterance in a particular language. Alongside papers on the periphery of SVO Indo- European languages (French, German, English, Italian), there are also studies that partly consider or fully focus on verb-final languages such as Chinese (both Mandarin and Cantonese), Japanese and Korean. There is a central theme to this volume: it explores the interaction between discourse functions and the diachronic and synchronic features of the different markers that may belong to each of the peripheral paradigms (left or right).

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Why is it important?

Functions at the left and right periphery is instructive, in that it reviews and expands on a wide range of previous relevant studies on the peripheries and peripheral discourse markers; it is also inspiring, in that the disagreement amongst the contributors as regards the asymmetry hypothesis invites further endeavours to test it. This book most definitely constitutes an example of how collective effort may throw considerable light on a “not so peripheral” topic within linguistics. Some rough edges that may be pointed out are the lack of sufficient quantitative evidence and the demanding references to languages besides the one in focus in some of the contributions. The key message to take away from the exemplary studies in this book is that extensive debate and research is still required for a functional (or constructional) account that may find unswerving links between specific meaning(s) and each of the peripheries.