Donna Jo Napoli reviews Luigi Burzio's "Italian Syntax: A Government-Binding Approach," highlighting its comprehensive analysis of Italian syntax, including verb classes, cliticization, and various syntactic phenomena. The book extends Burzio's earlier doctoral dissertation and is recommended for scholars of Romance studies and syntacticians. However, the reviewer argues that Burzio's claim that Italian has a class of ergative verbs, which are transitive in the lexicon but intransitive in syntax, is flawed. The reviewer challenges Burzio's analysis of ergative verbs in English, arguing that they are intransitive in both the lexicon and syntax, and that the concept of ergative movement is not supported by evidence in English. The reviewer also critiques Burzio's lexical principle, which links theta role assignment and case assignment, as theoretically unsound. The review concludes that Burzio's analysis of ergatives in Italian should not be extended to other languages without clear grammatical motivation, and that the concept of ergative verbs is more semantic than syntactic in English. The reviewer emphasizes the importance of careful consideration of syntactic analyses when applying them to different languages.Donna Jo Napoli reviews Luigi Burzio's "Italian Syntax: A Government-Binding Approach," highlighting its comprehensive analysis of Italian syntax, including verb classes, cliticization, and various syntactic phenomena. The book extends Burzio's earlier doctoral dissertation and is recommended for scholars of Romance studies and syntacticians. However, the reviewer argues that Burzio's claim that Italian has a class of ergative verbs, which are transitive in the lexicon but intransitive in syntax, is flawed. The reviewer challenges Burzio's analysis of ergative verbs in English, arguing that they are intransitive in both the lexicon and syntax, and that the concept of ergative movement is not supported by evidence in English. The reviewer also critiques Burzio's lexical principle, which links theta role assignment and case assignment, as theoretically unsound. The review concludes that Burzio's analysis of ergatives in Italian should not be extended to other languages without clear grammatical motivation, and that the concept of ergative verbs is more semantic than syntactic in English. The reviewer emphasizes the importance of careful consideration of syntactic analyses when applying them to different languages.