Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2002: Selected Papers from 'Going Romance', Groningen, 28–30 November 2002 (review)

‘Going Romance’ is a major European-based annual international conference on theoretical Romance linguistics. The present book contains fifteen selected papers delivered at the sixteenth installment of this conference held in November 2002 at the State University of Groningen.

Since Going Romance 2002 included a workshop on acquisition, five of the papers contained in the volume treat L1 acquisition-related issues. Cécile de Cat relies on data from two longitudinal corpora following the acquisition of French by children to argue that the pragmatic competence required to encode topics is available from the earliest attested stages of language production. Cristina Dye compares English, Spanish, French, and Italian in terms of variation in ostensibly nonfinite matrix verbs in child language, concluding that the occurrence of ostensibly nonfinite forms depends on the existence in a given language of a periphrastic construction embedding the same type of nonfinite verb. Jacqueline van Kampen incorporates Dutch data to explain the acquisition of free anaphors in child French, arguing that the use of free anaphors depends on the previous acquisition of D-marking. Ana T. Pérez-Leroux, Cristina Schmitt, and Alan Munn analyze the acquisition of inalienable possession in English and Spanish, supporting a distributional view of the phenomenon. Ken Wexler, Anna Gavarró, and Vincenç Torrens demonstrate that object-clitic omission in child Catalan and Spanish has a nonaccidental correlation with participle agreement.

Several articles focus on Romance dialectal varieties. Manuela Ambar, Manuela Gonzaga, and Esmeralda Negrão explore the differences in distribution and interpretation of the adverb sempre in European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, arguing that these differences are due to a parametric change taking place in the Brazilian variety. Clàudia Pons Moll draws on the premises of optimality theory to account for the different strategies of avoiding adjacent sibilant segments in Balearic Catalan. Marie-Thérèse Vinet challenges the traditional interpretation of the Quebec French enclitic -tu as an interrogative marker.

Cécile de Cat analyzes the impact of French subject clitics on the information structure of the sentence, demonstrating that subject clitics can appear only when the subject is interpreted as the topic of the sentence and are banned whenever the subject is in focus. Heles Contreras relies on Spanish and Romance data to propose the restricted view of head movement. Laura Dominguez proposes that in Spanish focus is realized both phonologically and syntactically. Mara Frascarelli provides a comparative analysis of Italian left and right topic constructions, examining the connection between syntax and information structure. Daniela Isac discusses the N-words in Italian, Spanish, European Portuguese, and Romanian. Daniela Isac and Charles Reiss provide a syntax-semantics analysis of X-else elements in Romance. Laura M. Kornfeld and Andrés L. Saab analyze nominal ellipsis in Spanish, arguing that the phenomenon is strongly constrained by operations and properties of morphological structure.