Twenty-one articles from the 31st LSRL investigate cutting-edge issues and interfaces across phonology, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, semantics, and syntax in multiple dialects of such Romance languages as Catalan, French, Creole French, and Spanish, both old and modern. Research in Romance phonology moves from the quantitative and synchronic to cover issues of diachrony and Optimality theory. Work within pragmatics and sociolinguistics also explores the synchronic/diachronic link while topicalizing such issues as change of non-pro-drop Swiss French toward pro-drop status, scalar implicatures, speech acts, word order, and simplification in contexts of language contact. Finally, debates in linguistic theory are resumed in the work on syntax and semantics within both a Minimalist perspective and an Optimality framework. How do Catalan and French children acquire AGR and TNS? Can Basque Spanish be compared to topic-oriented Chinese? If Spanish preverbal subjects occur in an A-position, can Spanish no longer be compared to Greek?

Twenty-one articles from the 31st LSRL investigate cutting-edge issues and interfaces across phonology, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, semantics, and syntax in multiple dialects of such Romance languages as Catalan, French, Creole French, and Spanish, both old and modern. Research in Romance phonology moves from the quantitative and synchronic to cover issues of diachrony and Optimality theory. Work within pragmatics and sociolinguistics also explores the synchronic/diachronic link while topicalizing such issues as change of non-pro-drop Swiss French toward pro-drop status, scalar implicatures, speech acts, word order, and simplification in contexts of language contact. Finally, debates in linguistic theory are resumed in the work on syntax and semantics within both a Minimalist perspective and an Optimality framework. How do Catalan and French children acquire AGR and TNS? Can Basque Spanish be compared to topic-oriented Chinese? If Spanish preverbal subjects occur in an A-position, can Spanish no longer be compared to Greek?

Twenty-one articles from the 31st LSRL investigate cutting-edge issues and interfaces across phonology, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, semantics, and syntax in multiple dialects of such Romance languages as Catalan, French, Creole French, and Spanish, both old and modern. Research in Romance phonology moves from the quantitative and synchronic to cover issues of diachrony and Optimality theory. Work within pragmatics and sociolinguistics also explores the synchronic/diachronic link while topicalizing such issues as change of non-pro-drop Swiss French toward pro-drop status, scalar implicatures, speech acts, word order, and simplification in contexts of language contact. Finally, debates in linguistic theory are resumed in the work on syntax and semantics within both a Minimalist perspective and an Optimality framework. How do Catalan and French children acquire AGR and TNS? Can Basque Spanish be compared to topic-oriented Chinese? If Spanish preverbal subjects occur in an A-position, can Spanish no longer be compared to Greek?

The annual Going Romance conference is the major European discussion forum for theoretically relevant research on Romance languages where current ideas about language in general and about Romance languages in particular are tested. Starting with the thirteenth conference held in 1999, volumes with selected papers of the conferences are published under the title Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory, This is the fifth such volume, containing a selection of papers that have been presented at the seventeenth Going Romance conference, held at the Radboud University Nijmegen (The Netherlands) from 20–22 November 2003. The three-day program included a workshop on 'Diachronic Phonology'. The present volume contains a broad range of articles dealing not only with syntax and phonology, but also with morphology, semantics and acquisition of the Romance languages.

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This volume contains a selection of refereed and revised papers, originally presented at the 32nd Linguistics Symposium on Romance Languages, dealing with linguistic theory as applied to the Romance languages, and on empirical studies on the acquisition of Romance, with studies on Romanian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romansch and Latin. The theoretical section contains contributions concentrating on specific properties of Romance at the syntax/semantics interface, on morphosyntactic issues, on subject licensing and case, and on phonology. The acquisition section includes contributions on first, bilingual and second language acquisition of functional structure, word structure, quantification and stress.

Printbegrænsninger: Der kan printes 10 sider ad gangen og max. 40 sider pr. session

The annual conference series ‘Going Romance’ has developed into a major European discussion forum where ideas about language and linguistics and about Romance languages in particular are put in an inter­active perspective, giving room to both universality and Romance-internal variation. The current volume contains a selection of the papers that were presented at the 20th Going Romance conference, held at the VU University in Amsterdam in December 2006. The papers in the volume deal with current issues in phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics, and range across a variety of Romance languages.

For many different reasons, speakers borrow words from other languages to fill gaps in their own lexical inventory. The past ten years have been characterized by a great interest among phonologists in the issue of how the nativization of loanwords occurs. The general feeling is that loanword nativization provides a direct window for observing how acoustic cues are categorized in terms of the distinctive features relevant to the L1 phonological system as well as for studying L1 phonological processes in action and thus to the true synchronic phonology of L1. The collection of essays presented in this volume provides an overview of the complex issues phonologists face when investigating this phenomenon and, more generally, the ways in which unfamiliar sounds and sound sequences are adapted to converge with the native language s sound pattern. This book is of interest to theoretical phonologists as well as to linguists interested in language contact phenomena."