This is the second of two volumes emanating from the Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages held at the University of Texas at Austin in February 2005. It features the keynote addresses delivered by Prof. Jacques Durand on the Phonology of Contemporary French Project and Prof. John Charles Smith on skeuomorphy and refunctionalization. It also includes eleven contributions by reputed scholars on topics ranging from phonetics, phonology, morphophonology, dialectology, sociolinguistics and language variation. Formal phonology papers favor the model of Optimality Theory, while phonetic measurements serve as the basis for sociolinguistic and dialectometric studies. Many of these studies emphasize new comparative, typological approaches to Romance data (including many non-standard varieties of French, Italian and Spanish). This volume will be of interest to all Romance linguists.

This is the second of two volumes emanating from the Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages held at the University of Texas at Austin in February 2005. It features the keynote addresses delivered by Prof. Jacques Durand on the Phonology of Contemporary French Project and Prof. John Charles Smith on skeuomorphy and refunctionalization. It also includes eleven contributions by reputed scholars on topics ranging from phonetics, phonology, morphophonology, dialectology, sociolinguistics and language variation. Formal phonology papers favor the model of Optimality Theory, while phonetic measurements serve as the basis for sociolinguistic and dialectometric studies. Many of these studies emphasize new comparative, typological approaches to Romance data (including many non-standard varieties of French, Italian and Spanish). This volume will be of interest to all Romance linguists.

This is the second of two volumes emanating from the "Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages "held at the University of Texas at Austin in February 2005. It features the keynote addresses delivered by Prof. Jacques Durand on the "Phonology of Contemporary French Project" and Prof. John Charles Smith on skeuomorphy and refunctionalization. It also includes eleven contributions by reputed scholars on topics ranging from phonetics, phonology, morphophonology, dialectology, sociolinguistics and language variation. Formal phonology papers favor the model of Optimality Theory, while phonetic measurements serve as the basis for sociolinguistic and dialectometric studies. Many of these studies emphasize new comparative, typological approaches to Romance data (including many non-standard varieties of French, Italian and Spanish). This volume will be of interest to all Romance linguists.

This handbook is structured in two parts: it provides, on the one hand, a comprehensive (synchronic) overview of the phonetics and phonology (including prosody) of a breadth of Romance languages and focuses, on the other hand, on central topics of research in Romance segmental and suprasegmental phonology, including comparative and diachronic perspectives. Phonetics and phonology have always been a core discipline in Romance linguistics: the wide synchronic variety of languages and dialects derived from spoken Latin is extensively explored in numerous corpus and atlas projects, and for quite a few of these varieties there is also more or less ample documentation of at least some of their diachronic stages. This rich empirical database offers excellent testing grounds for different theoretical approaches and allows for substantial insights into phonological structuring as well as into (incipient, ongoing, or concluded) processes of phonological change. The volume can be read both as a state-of-the-art report of research in the field and as a manual of Romance languages with special emphasis on the key topics of phonetics and phonology.

This book presents a thorough investigation of the main diachronic changes that have taken place in the palatal sounds of the Romance languages, as well as their current patterns of synchronic variation. André Zampaulo draws on extensive data not only from diachronic sources, but also from a range of current phonetic, phonological, and dialectal studies to motivate a formal, constraint-based account of palatal sound change. The analysis takes into account the role of phonetic information in the shaping of phonological patterns, approaching sound change from its inception during the speaker-listener interaction and formalizing it as the difference in constraint ranking between the grammar of the speaker and that of the listener-turned-speaker. The volume offers insights into how and why similar types of change may take place in different varieties and/or the same language at different times, and will be of interest to graduate students and researchers in historical linguistics, phonetics and phonology, Romance linguistics, and dialectology more broadly.

TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks as well as studies that provide new insights by building bridges to neighbouring fields such as neuroscience and cognitive science. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing.

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?

This volume is a selection of twenty peer-reviewed articles first presented at the 41st annual Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), held at the University of Ottawa in 2011. They are thematically linked by a broad notion of variation across languages, dialects, speakers, time, linguistic contexts, and communicative situations. Furthermore, the articles address common theoretical and empirical issues from different formal, experimental, or corpus-based perspectives. The languages analyzed belong to the main members of the Romance family, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, French, Ladin, Italian, Sardinian, and Romanian, and a variety of topics across a wide spectrum of linguistic subfields, from phonetics to semantics, as well as historical linguistics, bilingualism and second-language learning, is covered. By illustrating the richness and complementarity of subjects, methods, and theoretical frameworks explored within Romance linguistics, significant contributieons are made to both the documentation of Romance languages and to linguistic theory.

This volume contains a selection of nineteen peer-reviewed papers from the 42nd annual Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL) held at Southern Utah University in Cedar City, Utah, in 2012. The contributions cover a wide range of current topics in the areas of phonetics, phonology, syntax, interfaces, and diachronic Romance linguistics, with an emphasis on experimental approaches, in connection to L1 and L2 acquisition, code-switching and psycholinguistics. Among the languages and varieties of Romance analyzed are French (Old, Modern, and Norman), Portuguese (Brazilian and Classical), and Spanish (Modern and Judeo-Spanish), but also Italo-Romance, Latin, and Romanian. In a comparative tradition, the discussions extend to languages outside Romance, such as dialects of Arabic, Germanic, and Palenquero creole. This collection of papers at the forefront of research contributes to our understanding of Romance languages, and to the influence of Romance linguistics, and will be of interest to scholars in Romance and general linguistics.