Grammatical Analyses in Basque and Romance Linguistics: Papers in Honor of Mario Saltarelli (review)

This volume pays tribute to Mario Saltarelli’s work with a selection of fifteen relevant papers on current theoretical issues within Basque and Romance linguistics which can be seen as a partial sample of Saltarelli’s research interests. Of the fifteen papers, only two deal with phonological processes. Michael Mazzola studies Tuscan geminates, demonstrating that they are best understood within the context of a trimoraic foot, shown to be active in Latin. José Ignacio Hualde traces the evolution of Basque plosives, showing that Basque had a firm neutralization of the voiced-voiceless distinction in stops only in morpheme-internal intervocalic position. The neutralization would be extended to the utterance-initial position explaining why, in borrowings from Latin, voiceless stops become voiced in initial position.

Within the syntactic domain, three papers represent the current interest in clitics. Dieter Wanner argues that clitic clusters cannot be seen as the sole consequence of syntactic principles, proposing that they also respond to the reproduction of given models and to optional generalizations. Eduardo Raposo proposes that European Portuguese clitics are underlying determiners which, against the received view, can be shown to be proclitic. Margarita Suñer addresses the obligatory clitic doubling of object pronouns in Spanish. Assuming Molly Diesing’s mapping hypothesis, she shows that pronouns, being definite, have to escape covertly the domain of existential closure and that clitic doubling is just a syntactic mark of this process.

Binding theory is also heavily represented. Luigi Burzio claims that any adequate theory of anaphora is bound to be one of ranked, violable constraints. Heles Contreras suggests taking weak crossover to be an epiphenomenon, related to (1) the c-command condition on variable binding and (2) two ill-understood conditions on backwards pronominalization. Marta Luján, assuming that clauses are case-marked, unifies obviation and control phenomena as the result of exceptional case marking constructions. There is control or obviation when the subject pronoun of a complement clause covertly escapes its minimal clause domain. Co- or contra-indexation depends on whether the pronoun is a reflexive and whether it LF-adjoins to a C head that bears the main verb case feature. Errapel Mejías-Bikandi studies four types of reflexive predicates in Spanish within the relational grammar framework, two of which (the reirse ‘to laugh’ and olvidarse ‘to forget’ types) are analyzed in terms of a reflexive antipassive construction.

Formal features and functional projections constitute another field of inquiry. Héctor Campos proposes an analysis of partitive and passive constructions in Spanish. He claims that the D-feature of passive morphology is strong both in English and Spanish and that Spanish incorporates the participle into the passive auxiliary by spell out. Claudia Parodi and Carlos Quicoli analyze the relationship between agreement and structural case cross-linguistically, arguing that they have essentially different properties. Karen Zagona explores the relationship between voice and aspect, showing how voice alternations in Spanish exhibit aspectual contrasts and proposing that spec-head checking determines whether aspectual features are interpreted. Jon Ortiz de Urbina provides support for the existence of a force phrase in the Basque left periphery.

Finally, two papers concentrate on the NP domain. Violeta Demonte explores the relationship between syntactic position and interpretation of Spanish adjectives. She defends the notion that prenominal adjectives are adjoined to a degree phrase, projected above the NP, whereas postnominal predicative adjectives are derived from a small clause configuration. Juan Martín studies the semantics of Spanish nominalizations and claims that those that project an affected complement are semantically saturated by it.

The volume serves as an itinerary of interests and methodologies within Romance linguistics from which anyone interested...