Current Issues in Romance Languages (review)

This book contains a selection of papers presented at the 29th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages, (Ann Arbor, MI, 8–11 April 1999). The papers represent a wide range of topics, from syntax and semantics to phonetics and phonology to discourse markers, and cover issues both in the commonly studied Romance languages (e.g. Spanish, French, Italian) and in other Romance languages and creoles (e.g. Vimeu Picard, Haitian Creole, Afro-Iberian creoles). Also, various approaches are taken by the chapters’ authors, from purely theoretical to experimental. As would be the case with any volume containing such a range of research topics, any individual scholar will likely find some papers to be of substantial interest and others to be significantly less interesting. The papers are arranged in alphabetical order by author, though it seems that a general grouping by research area may have better served the reader. The three-year lapse between the conference and the publication of this book means that some of the papers do not reflect current research; yet, the volume is still an important contribution to the library of scholarship on Romance linguistics since the majority of the papers represent ongoing themes in Romance linguistics research.

Contributors to the volume, and the titles of their papers, are: Nancy Mae Antrim (‘On becoming a clitic’), Zsuzsanna Bárkányi (‘Primary stress in Spanish’), Claudia Brovetto (‘Spanish clauses without complementizers’), Viviane Déprez (‘On the nature of bare nouns in Haitian Creole’), Ricardo Etxepare and Kleanthes K. Grohmann (‘Towards a syntax of adult root infinitives’), Timothy L. Face (‘Re-examining Spanish “resyllabification” ’), Grant Goodall (‘On preverbal subjects in Spanish’), Javier Gutiérrez -Rexach (‘The semantics of Spanish free relatives’), David Heap (‘Split subject pronoun paradigms: Feature geometry and underspecification’), Paula Kempchinsky (‘Locative inversion, PP topicalization and the EPP’), Anthony M. Lewis (‘Contrast maintenance and intervocalic stop lenition in Spanish and Portuguese: When is it alright to lenite?’), John M. Lipski (‘Epenthesis vs. elision in Afro-Iberian language: A constraint-based approach to creole phonology’), Monica Malamud (‘Contrastive discourse markers in Spanish: Beyond contrast’), Richard E.Morris (‘Coda obstruents and local constraint conjunction in north-central peninsular Spanish’), Alan Munn and Cristina Schmitt (‘Bare nouns and the morphosyntax of number’), Josep Quer (‘Non-logical if ’), Joan Rafel (‘Select ing atomic cells from temporal domains: Fixing parameters in Romance’), Lori Repetti (‘Nonhomorganic nasal clusters in northern Italian dialects’), Edward J. Rubin (‘Romanian nominal structure, proforms, and genitive case checking’), Petra Sleeman (‘Adjectival agreement within DP without feature movement’), Jeffrey Steele and Julie Auger (‘A constraint-based analysis of intraspeaker variation: Vocalic epenthesis in Vimeu Picard’), Esther Torrego (‘Aspects in the prepositional system of Romance’), Dieter Vermandere (‘A unified analysis of French and Italian en/ne’), and Caroline R. Wiltshire (‘Variation in Spanish aspiration and prosodic boundary constraints’).