New Approaches to Old Problems: Issues in Romance Historical Linguistics (review)

This volume contains revised versions of thirteen of the papers presented at the parasession ‘New Solutions to Old Problems: Issues in Romance Historical Linguistics’, 29^th Linguistic Symposium on the Romance Languages (University of Michigan, 1999). Working within different theoretical and methodological frameworks, the volume’s three parts deal with general problems, with phonology and morphology, and with syntax and semantics, leaving aside lexical studies and derivational morphology. Thematically, the thirteen studies are united through the application of new analytical approaches (e.g. the Minimalist Program and Optimality Theory) to longstanding issues in Romance historical linguistics such as Romance lenition of stops, atonic vowel loss patterns in Old French and Old Spanish, the role of analogy in some Southwest Spanish morphological changes, koineization in Early Castile, syntactic diffusion in Hispano-Romance infinitival complements, the role of features in historical change, Spanish object agreement markers, the placement of French clitics, French complex inversion, and infinitive subordinators. The volume itself mirrors current (American) tendencies in Romance historical linguistics and reflects the modern shift from Romance to linguistics that the discipline of Romance linguistics has observed in the 1990s.

In addition to language-specific essays, the volume also contains two studies on broad methodological issues. One of them was given as the opening plenary paper of the symposium and argues in favor of an immanent dynamic perspective on language acquisition and language change which, unlike typologies, grammaticalization approaches, and especially parameters, considers the role of social conditioning of language change fundamental. The other essay offers an alternative approach to the traditional perspective on grammaticalization as a dichotomy between analytic and synthetic constructions.

According to the editors, the characteristic common to all papers in this volume is the emphasis on theory and on how different perspectives bring in changes to a specific theoretical framework. Though not all papers fit neatly into the framework of a particular formal theory, they all echo recent trends in the discipline—so old and in the meantime so new—and illustrate how it has changed over the years. They offer the Romance linguist a fresh overview of what Romance linguistics looks like at the beginning of a new millennium.

In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include: Jurgen Klausenburger; Thomas D. Cravens; Dale Hartkemeyer; Glenn A. Martinez; Donald N. Tuten; Mark Davies; Monique Dufresne, Fernande Dupuis & Mireille Tremblay; Andrés Enrique-Arias; Paul Hirschbühler & Marie Labelle; Ken Johnson; Enrique Mallén, France Martineau, & Virginia Motapanyane.