Napoli's study takes a refreshing look at the notions of argument and predicate. Recent discussions of predication with Government and Binding theory stress the configurational properties of the phrases involved, and Napoli argues that this has led to proposals for more and more elaborate syntactic structures that still fail to give genuinely explanatory accounts. She presents a convincing case for the idea of predicate as a semantic primitive that cannot be defined simply by looking at the lexicon or simply at semantic structure, and offers a theory of predication where the key to the...

These volumes form an authoritative statement of the current state of research in Operator Algebras.