Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2001: Selected Papers from 'Going Romance,' Amsterdam, 6-8 December 2001 (review)

‘Going Romance’ is a major European annual discussion forum for theoretical research on Romance languages. This book is a selection of the papers that were presented at Going Romance 15 in 2001.

Luis Alonso-Ovalle’s opening chapter, ‘Spanish de-clauses are not always in the right mood’, reconsiders Sabine Iatridou’s question about the interpretation of mood in conditionals. In ‘Mood and focus’, Claudia Borgonovo proposes an analysis of modal choice in Spanish in terms of negation and its focus. Ch. 3 by João Costa is dedicated to ‘Null vs overt Spec, TP in European Portuguese’. He puts forward the idea that there exist preverbal A-positions for subjects in null-subject languages. In the following paper, Viviane Déprez examines the ‘Determiner architecture and phrasal movement in French lexifier creoles’. Edward Göbbel’s paper, ‘On the relation between focus, prosody, and word order in Romanian’, examines information structure in this Romance language. In ‘Economy of structure’, Cecilia Goria presents an analysis of subject clitics based on Piedmontese. Ch. 7 is dedicated to Daniela Isaac’s analysis of ‘Identificational focus vs contrastive focus’ in Romanian. The complexity of the null object category is the topic of Mary Kato’s ‘Null objects and VP ellipsis in European and Brazilian Portuguese’. In ‘From non-identity to plurality’, Brenda Laca and Liliane Tasmowski show the double nature of French différent, which behaves both as an adjective and as a determiner. Karen Lahousse’s ‘On the nonunitariness of NP subject inversion’ shows that French NP subject inversion in interrogatives and in temporal subordinates are two different mechanisms.

‘Past participle agreement with pronominal clitics and the auxiliary verbs in Italian and French’ is the topic of Paul Law’s contribution. In ‘Deficient pronouns and linguistic change in Portuguese and Spanish’, Ana Maria Martins examines clitics in Old Romance and their derivatives in Spanish and Portuguese. In ‘Nominalizations of French psychological verbs’, Judith Meinschaefer analyzes the syntactic and semantic contribution of argument structure to nominalization. Andrea Moro’s ‘Notes on vocative case’ shows the anomalous behavior of vocative case with respect to other cases. In ‘Mapping out the left periphery of the clause’, Sandra Paoli offers support to Luigi Rizzi’s intuition about the existence of a low C-head with modal content. The left periphery of the clause is also the topic of the paper that follows, by Dorian Roehrs and Marie Labelle: ‘The left periphery in child French’. In ‘Plural indefinite DPs as plural-polarity items’, Benjamin Spector offers an account for the interpretation of French DPs introduced by the partitive article des. The partitive determiner, this time in Italian, is also analyzed in the next paper, ‘On the status of the partitive determiner in Italian’, by Gianluca Storto. Finally, determiners in general are the topic of the last paper, by Lucia Tovena, ‘Determiners and weakly discretised domains’, where the notion of weakly discrete units is introduced in order to account for the distribution of singular determiners expressing constant functions.