Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 1999 (review)

The volume contains selected papers from the thirteenth ‘Going Romance’ conference (Leiden University, 9–11 December 1999). The fifteen articles in the volume deal with a variety of topics and theoretical perspectives. Six focus on negation as the conference included a one-day workshop on negation, while others concern various syntactic, semantic, and lexical aspects of Romance languages.

Four papers deal directly or indirectly with the phenomenon of ‘negative concord’. António Branco and Berthold Crysmann investigate multiple negative items jointly expressing a single negation in Romance languages. Francis Corblin and Lucia M. Tovena derive the negative concord phenomena from more general principles and constraints on the occurrence of negative expressions within clause boundaries. Gabriela Matos presents a minimalist approach to this phenomenon, and Akira Watanabe shows systematic differences between Italian and West Flemish with respect to the negative concord system. Paul Rowlett presents the distinction between two main types of negative markers in Romance languages (preverbal vs. postverbal) and the contexts in which the preverbal type appears in nonverbal contexts in French.

Manuela Ambar and Rita Veloso address some puzzling questions concerning wh-phrases, their constituency and distribution. The data taken from Portuguese, French, Hungarian, and Tetum exemplify the apparently diverse behavior of wh-interrogatives. Ana Maria Brito’s article discusses certain aspects of clause structure in European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese related to the positions of the adverb sempre. Raffaella Folli focuses on the relation of priority between causative and inchoative constructions in Italian and proposes a unified analysis of different possibilities. Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach discusses Spanish exclamative constructions exhibiting a wide variety of patterns and a number of additional issues pertaining to the syntax/semantics interface and to specific exclamative constructions. Jaume Mateu Fontanals revises some former lexical relational analysis of the so-called ‘locative verbs’ and ‘locatum verbs’ on the basis of Romance and especially Catalan data. Nicola Munaro provides an analysis of the internal structure of a class of WH-items attested in Piedmontese, Valdotain, and Ligurian dialects. Gemma Rigau’s article illustrates the lexical properties and syntactic behavior of certain Romance temporal existential verbs. Svetlana Vogeleer argues that French avant and jusqu’à are not logically equivalent in negative sentences, as some linguists have proposed for their English counterparts before and until. The semantic difference derives from their syntactic status since avant-phrases are time constituents whereas jusqu’à-phrases are duration constituents. M. Teresa Espinal explores the property-denoting objects in idiomatic constructions on data taken especially from Catalan. Jean-Marie Marandin postulates the presence of unaccusative inversion in French, implying for the grammar of French that the phenomenon analyzed in traditional and in generative grammar under the heading ‘subject inversion’ should be divided into two types: stylistic inversion and unaccusative inversion. Marandin summarizes the main differences and similarities between them.

The languages investigated include Catalan, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, and a number of Northern Italian dialects. Almost all of the papers assume a synchronic perspective of description. The variety of topics and theoretical perspectives represent quite well the state of affairs in regard to theoretical approaches to Romance linguistics.