A Half Century Of Romance Linguistics Selected Proceedings Of The 50th Linguistic Symposium On Romance Languages

The present volume presents a selection of the revised and peer-reviewed proceedings articles of the 50th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL 50) which was hosted virtually by the faculty and students from the University of Texas at Austin. With contributions from rising and senior scholars from Europe and the Americas, the volume demonstrates the breadth of research in contemporary Romance linguistics with articles that apply corpus-based and laboratory methods, as well as theory, to explore the structure, use, and development of the Romance languages. The articles cover a wide range of fields including morphosyntax, semantics, language variation and change, sociophonetics, historical linguistics, language acquisition, and computational linguistics. In an introductory article, the editors document the sudden transition of LSRL 50 to a virtual format and acknowledge those who helped them to ensure the continuity of this annual scholarly meeting.

The present volume presents a selection of the revised and peer-reviewed proceedings articles of the 50th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL 50) which was hosted virtually by the faculty and students from the University of Texas at Austin. With contributions from rising and senior scholars from Europe and the Americas, the volume demonstrates the breadth of research in contemporary Romance linguistics with articles that apply corpus-based and laboratory methods, as well as theory, to explore the structure, use, and development of the Romance languages. The articles cover a wide range of fields including morphosyntax, semantics, language variation and change, sociophonetics, historical linguistics, language acquisition, and computational linguistics. In an introductory article, the editors document the sudden transition of LSRL 50 to a virtual format and acknowledge those who helped them to ensure the continuity of this annual scholarly meeting.

Alexandra Cornilescu is an internationally renowned linguist, whose pioneering ideas have been influential in developing generative grammar in Romania, Europe and beyond. The weightiness of her contributions to the field is matched only by her talent for disseminating them. Ever since 1970, when she started teaching at the University of Bucharest, she has continuously played a tireless and inspirational role in the creation of several generations of linguists, which the academic world has come to admiringly refer to as The Bucharest School. As the initiator of the AICED conference, held annually in the English Department at the University of Bucharest, she has turned it into one of the leading platforms of generative linguistics in Europe. She has published extensively on Romanian and English linguistics and is also the founder and past editor of the journal Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics. On the occasion of her 75th birthday, her friends, students and colleagues celebrate Alexandra Cornilescu’s work with this collection of essays on various topics of current theoretical interest.

This volume brings together contributions by researchers focusing on personal pronouns in Ibero-Romance languages, going beyond the well-established variable of expressed vs. non-expressed subjects. While factors such as agreement morphology, topic shift and contrast or emphasis have been argued to account for variable subject expression, several corpus studies on Ibero-Romance languages have shown that the expression of subject pronouns goes beyond these traditionally established factors and is also subject to considerable dialectal variation. One of the factors affecting choice and expression of personal pronouns or other referential devices is whether the construction is used personally or impersonally. The use and emergence of new impersonal constructions, eventually also new (im)personal pronouns, as well as the variation found in the expression of human impersonality in different Ibero-Romance language varieties is another interesting research area that has gained ground in the recent years. In addition to variable subject expression, similar methods and theoretical approaches have been applied to study the expression of objects. Finally, the reference to the addressee(s) using different address pronouns and other address forms is an important field of study that is closely connected to the variable expression of pronouns. The present book sheds light on all these aspects of reference to discourse participants. The volume contains contributions with a strong empirical background and various methods and both written and spoken corpus data from Ibero-Romance languages. The focus on discourse participants highlights the special properties of first and second person referents and the factors affecting them that are often different from the anaphoric third person. The chapters are organized into three thematic sections: (i) Variable expression of subjects and objects, (ii) Between personal and impersonal, and (iii) Reference to the addressee.

This volume presents research from across the subdisciplines of Hispanic Linguistics in an attempt to showcase how new research methods, together with a renewed focus on language variation, have advanced our field. This volume is divided into three sections of original research, with the first describing regional variation of Spanish, the second synchronic variation, and the third learner profile variation. Such nuanced descriptions and analyses would not be possible without new variationist research methods and big-data techniques such as the use of online corpora and data reduction analyses. These overarching themes represent a paradigm shift affecting the whole of Hispanic Linguistics, and are, therefore, best appreciated in an edited volume composed of diverse manifestations of trends like those included herein. The data from these submissions were originally presented at the Hispanic Linguistics Symposium hosted by Wake Forest University in 2021.

The papers collected in this volume reflect the numerous interests in the field of Romance languages and Romance linguistics today. A far-ranging amount of Romance data are presented: French, Italian, and Spanish dialect data are crucial to several authors' arguments, Rumanian is the focus of two papers, and many of the papers included discuss overall Romance developments. It is noteworthy that formal approaches to syntax are here regularly applied to historical data (three papers specifically deal with pro-drop phenomena in Old French). Of the papers on phonology, syllabification and linking processes receive much attention.

This study investigates the properties of a set of Italian adverbs (among others: pure ‘also’, solo ‘only’, un po’ ‘a bit’) that, in specific contexts of use, modify the speech acts in which they appear. On the one hand, these elements specify the way in which a speech act should be interpreted with reference to the specific interactional context, modifying its illocutionary force. On the other hand, they index presupposed/inferred meanings active in the common ground of the interaction, integrating the speech act in the common ground. These functions closely resemble those of the elements that, especially in the German linguistic tradition, are called modal particles. Drawing on original data from Italian – both from the standard language and regional varieties – the goal of the study is to describe the synchronic features of these elements and to explain the emergence of the modal uses. For this purpose, it jointly employs theoretical notions of pragmatics (speech act theory, inferences in interaction), models of language change (reanalysis and conventionalization) and the descriptive tools of sociolinguistic approaches. Through the presentation of four case studies, integrating corpus and questionnaire data, the present work gives a thorough analysis of the modal functions and the contexts of use of the adverbs under investigation: it explores their role at the semantics/pragmatics interface, it discusses their place in a layered model of grammar and it examines their distribution across different language varieties.

The twenty papers from the eighteenth Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages deal with diverse aspects of the Romance languages and Romance linguistics. They reflect the current state of Romance studies in North America and of the particular outlook among the international group of contributors and participants to LSRL 18. The thriving research front accords central importance to formal questions of synchronic analysis. The group of seven historical and typological papers amounts to a strong alternative. Several papers treat the group of Romance languages not only as a well-defined, almost exclusive research province, but move from Romance phenomena outward to other language types, even to genuinely universal dimensions. Other contributions maintain a more circumscribed outlook exploiting the typological closeness of the Romance idioms for improved analyses. Three invited contributions by Georg Bossong, Yves Charles-Morin and Maria-Luisa Rivero on typological, phonological and syntactic questions set the tone for the volume.