A Romance Perspective on Language Knowledge and Use (review)

This book contains selected papers presented at the 31st Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (University of Illinois-Chicago, April 2001). The twenty-one articles that constitute the volume are grouped into three sections: (1) phonology and morphology, (2) pragmatics and sociolinguistics, and (3) syntax. This selection, according to the editors, offers a snapshot of all talks given at the conference.

The first section, the least extensive, explores four topics: the status of pronominal clitics in Vimeu Picard (Julie Auger), syllable-final and syllable-initial/s/reduction in the Spanish of Ascención located in Chihuahua, Mexico (Esther L. Brown and Rena Torres Cacoullos), consonant intrusion in heterosyllabic consonant-liquid clusters in Old Spanish and Old French (Fernando Martínez-Gil), and Italian (phono)syntactic doubling (Mario Saltarelli). This section draws extensively on the premises of optimality theory.

The themes addressed in the second section are the notions of focus, ground, given, and discourse topic in French (Claire Beyssade, Jean-Marie Marandin, and Annie Rialland), subject clitics in conversational Swiss and conversational Metropolitan French (Bonnie Fonseca-Greber and Linda R. Waugh), semantics and pragmatics of the Spanish negative polarity item que digamos (Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach and Scott A. Schwenter), properties of Italian imperfect conditionals (Michela Ippolito), the choice of the preposition introducing indirect objects in ditransitive constructions of Portuguese spoken in Fortaleza, Brazil (Heloisa Maria M. Lima Salles and Maria Marta P. Scherre), conventionally indirect requests in Uruguayan and Peninsular Spanish (Rosina Márquez Reiter), simplification of Spanish third person accusative clitics by Mexican-Americans of Houston, Texas (N. Ariana Mrak), the linguistic manifestation of the notion of topic in the Spanish of La Plata, Argentina (Francisco Ocampo), and contact-induced changes in noun gender observed in the Spanish of New York City Latinos (Ricardo Otheguy and Naomi Lapidus). The majority of these studies rely on linguistic corpora and employ quantitative analysis.

The papers in the final section investigate properties of the Spanish indirect object clitic-doubling construction (Tonia Bleam), sequence of tense in complex clauses with main perception verbs (Alicia Cipria), patterns of L1 acquisition of functional categories by French and Catalan children (Lisa Davidson and Géraldine Légendre), crosslinguistic variations in the meanings of bare nouns in creole and noncreole languages (Viviane Deprez), null objects in Basque Spanish (Jon Franco and Alazne Landa), have/be alternations in the case of French pronominal verbs in the passé surcomposé (Kate Paesani), the position of preverbal subjects in Spanish (Margarita Suñer), and the properties of the French wh-in-situ construction (María Luisa Zubizarreta). Among the theoretical approaches employed in this section are the minimalist program and optimality theory.

The volume would be of interest to any linguist concerned with the application of linguistic theory to Romance data. In addition, because of the high number of papers dealing with linguistic variation, the collection constitutes a valuable reference for those Romance linguists whose research belongs to the domain of dialectology.