Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2004. Selected papers from 'Going Romance', Leiden 9-11 December 2004 (review)

This volume contains a selection of the papers presented at the 18^th edition of Going Romance. Thirteen contributions, twelve from the main conference, one from the special workshop on Diachronic morphology and syntax, but none from any of the four invited speakers, investigate a mixture of issues related to any one or more of the Romance languages, addressing topics in the fields of syntax, semantics and language acquisition. A brief overview of the contributions: Arregui deals with the interpretation of the Spanish indefinite qualquier (any), its interaction with metalinguistic negation and the fact that it does license exception phrases. Bartra and Villalba compare and contrast lo-de 'Me sorprendió lo caro de la casa' and lo-que 'Me sorprendió lo cara que era la casa' (I was surprised at how expensive the house was) clauses. Cornilescu investigates the category 'adjective', claiming a distinction, based on both syntactic and semantic factors, between NP-and DP-type adjectives, and showing that DP-adjectives may be pre-nominal. Crisma and Gianollo inquire on the origin of Romance N-raising. Cyrino and Matos provide evidence for analysing Null Complement Anaphora in Brazilian and European Portuguese as a surface anaphor. Folli and Harley focus on DPs introduced by a 'to' in Italian, showing how they differ depending on whether they are benefactives or goals. Gallego offers an analysis of relative clauses involving T-to-C movement. Grohmann and Etxepare compare infinitival structures across Romance and Martins does so with syntactic expressions of emphatic affirmation. Morimoto and de Swart trace the origin and development of differential object marking in Spanish. Obenauer tackles interrogatives and their varied functions drawing on a number of Northern Italian dialects. Schoorlemmer proposes a new analysis of complex inversion in French. Solà and Gavarró concentrate on wh-subextraction in Catalan and claim it is an instance of remnant movement. The quality of the discussions is, in general, very good, with clear argumentation. The specificity of the issues addressed and the theoretical frameworks adopted to analyse them make the volume rather inaccessible and dry to the non-expert; for the latter it is, nevertheless, a useful source of data, as most of the contributions provide neatly-presented and glossed examples. The audience intended for the volume is, therefore, clearly specialised, and these readers will find the contents of the volume interesting and stimulating, delving into current and cutting-edge research topics. As expected with conference proceedings, there is no specific linking theme, and the volume appears to be rather fragmentary. Although not a negative feature per se, in this case the problem is greatly magnified by the total absence of an introduction, which as well as providing the reader with a general overview of the contents of the book would have also presented it as a coherent collection. This is rather surprising and unexpected, given the status (and price) of the publication. A final point about editing: there does not seem to be a consistent way of presenting examples. There is no generally adopted glossing convention and in some cases no translation is provided.