Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2000: Selected Papers from 'Going Romance' 2000, Utrecht, 30 November-2 December (review)

This book contains sixteen selected papers delivered at ‘Going Romance 2000’, a conference held at Utrecht University, with a workshop on Topic and Focus. Six of the papers stem from the workshop while the rest treat a variety of other syntactic and semantic issues in different Romance languages.

Two papers examine the analysis of pro_arb, with special attention to Spanish. Luis Alonso-Ovalle questions the semantic import of the arb index and shows that both its generic and existential readings can be derived without appealing to this index. In the same spirit, Raúl Aranovich suggests eliminating the arb index and provides evidence that supports a second-order predication analysis of the impersonal se construction.

Manuela Ambar correlates crosslinguistic variation in wh-structures with other parameters of variation across languages such as properties of inflection and properties of the determiner system of each language. A unified analysis of two different types of complementizer deletion in Florentine in terms of alternative checking is offered by Gloria Cocchi and Cecilia Poletto. João Costa and Charlotte Galves show that European and Brazilian Portuguese differ as to the position of the subject.

Evidence from indefinite DPs in Romanian is used by Donka Farkas to argue that the existing semantic classifications of DPs are not sufficiently fine-grained to capture some distinctions among indefinite DPs. Raffaella Folli looks at resultatives in Italian and English and argues that they are associated with different syntactic structures. Nicola Munaro studies subject clitic-verb inversion in several Northeastern Italian varieties and correlates different interpretations to different landing sites of the inflected verb inside a split-CP.

Using antisymmetry theory, Petra Sleeman and Ellen-Petra Kester examine partitive constructions in French and suggest a small clause analysis. Roberto Zamparelli suggests that Romance definite NPs behave similarly to English bare nouns in showing also two distinct interpretive possibilities: an object-level reading and a kind-level one.

A variety of phonological, syntactic, and pragmatic features of topic and focus are considered in the workshop papers. Alexandra Cornilescu looks at the structure of the left periphery and suggests that in Romanian, as opposed to Italian, FocP is rhematic rather than contrastive. João Costa proposes that in European Portuguese there is no preverbal FocP: Focus always appears at the rightmost position in the clause. In the framework of construction grammar, Knud Lambrecht shows that the discourse function of the presentational relative construction in French is to introduce a new entity into a given discourse and express some propositional information involving this entity. With special attention to French and Modern Greek, David Le Gac and Hi-Yon Yoo investigate how prosody marks topic and focus and suggest that information structure has a language-independent impact on prosodic structure. Josep Quer shows that in addition to focus fronting (FF), several Romance languages (Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian) also have quantificational fronting. Finally, in the framework of optimality theory, Kriszta Szendrői shows how a single ranking of constraints can account for the differences between three constructions in Italian that involve a marked focused element.