This is a collection of articles describing and analyzing several of the most important morphosyntactic features for which the formal comparison between Basque and its surrounding Romance languages is relevant, such as word order, inflection, case, argument structure and causatives. In the context of a language virtually all of whose speakers are bilingual in either Spanish or French, the theoretically informed in-depth description offered in this volume focuses on the fine grain of linguistic structures from languages typologically quite apart but coexisting and probably interacting in the minds of speakers. It therefore aims at shedding some light on the types of interactions between different systems and on the systems themselves.

This volume contains fifteen articles on current theoretical issues in Basque and Romance linguistics. Even though Basque and Romance languages are typologically different and have different genetic origins, one thousand years of coexistence have shown certain parallelisms in their respective grammars. It is Mario Saltarelli that first offered a formal linguistic account of phonological and syntactic phenomena that occur in these two language groups. Thus, this compilation of articles in both Basque and Romance linguistics not only pays tribute to Saltarelli‘s work by acknowledging his formalization of this relational insight, but also comprises state of the art research on languages with strong geographical and historical kinship.Fifteen reviewed articles written by sixteen top scholars in the field provide fresh analyses of long standing challenging phenomena in Romance and Basque linguistics such as geminates, the evolution of Basque plosives, clitic doubling, clitic clustering, directionality of clitization, the role of agreement, focus, the interaction of voice and aspect, unaccusativity, semantic interpretation and syntactic structure of Determiner Phrases, obviation, control, and anaphoric and pronominal binding. This variety of topics however is unified by limiting the contributions to the four major formal areas of linguistics, and to one single framework, Generative Grammar, although in some of its many incarnations such as Minimalism, Optimality Theory, and Relational Grammar. All this, along with the number of languages covered by the authors (Aragonese, Basque, Catalan, French, Galician, Gascon, Italian and many of its dialects (Ligurian, Piedmontese, Tuscan...), Classical and Late Latin, Occitan, Brazilian and European Portuguese, Romanian, Old and Modern Spanish among others), makes the book of great value to any linguist working in Romance or Basque linguistics.

The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon.

This collective volume on nominal expressions in Basque, a language isolate with no known relatives, comprises original papers on the syntactic structure and the interpretation of both Noun Phrases and nominalization constructions – a traditionally neglected aspect of Basque linguistics. The minute attention to properties and paradigms previously overlooked, and the analyses of them in the light of recent advances in syntactic theory make this book a valuable tool for syntacticians, semanticists and morphologists. This work fills a gap in the theoretical study of Basque, and the richness of data presented makes it interesting for any researcher from whatever particular theoretical persuasion. This volume is especially useful for researchers, graduate students, and advanced undergraduate students of comparative grammar, typology, and theoretical linguistics.

This volume presents recent theoretical research on Romance languages, selected from papers presented at the 25th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages. It includes studies of individual Romance languages as well as comparative studies — both within the Romance family and with non-Romance languages (Basque, Bulgarian, Germanic and Quechua). Papers in phonetics and phonology treat stress, syllable structure, s-weakening, and the declination effect. Morphological topics include class-marker suppression and gender agreement and suppletion. Topics in syntactic theory include clitics, participial and adjectival agreement, the syntax of tense, mood, negation, adjectival predication, Tough-constructions, quantification and null objects.

Basque is the sole survivor of the very ancient languages of Western Europe. This book, written by an internationally renowned specialist in Basque, provides a comprehensive survey of all that is known about the prehistory of the language, including pronunciation, the grammar and the vocabulary. It also provides a long critical evaluation of the search for its relatives, as well as a thumbnail sketch of the language, a summary of its typological features, an external history and an extensive bibliography.

The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon.