Focus And Background In Romance Languages

Papers presented at a workshop, Focus and background in Romance languages, that convened during the 30th Romanistentag, in Vienna, Austria, 23-27 September 2007.

Focus–background structure has taken center stage in much current theorizing about sentence prosody, syntax, and semantics. However, both the inventory of focus expressions found cross-linguistically and the interpretive consequences associated with each of these continue to be insufficiently described. This volume aims at providing new observations on the availability and the use of focus markings in Romance languages. In doing so, it documents the plurality of research on focus in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian. Topics covered include constituent fronting and clefting, the position of subjects and focus particles, clitic doubling of objects, and information packaging in complex sentences. In addition, some contributions explore focus–background structure from acquisitional and diachronic angles, while others adopt a comparative perspective, studying differences between individual Romance and Germanic languages. Therefore, this volume is of interest to a broad audience within linguistics, including syntacticians, semanticists, and historical linguists.

This volume contains a selective collection of peer-reviewed papers that were presented at the 26th Going Romance conference, organized at the KU Leuven (Belgium) from 6-8 December 2012. The annual Going Romance conference has developed into the major European discussion forum for theoretically relevant research on Romance languages. The present volume testifies to the significance of the analysis of Romance languages for the field of linguistics in general, and theoretical linguistics in particular. It contains eleven articles dealing with issues related to all core linguistic domains and interfaces, and representing different empirical phenomena. The articles provide data from a significant range of Romance languages and language varieties (French, standard Italian and Italian dialects, Spanish, Catalan, Catalan Contact Spanish, standard and non-standard European Portuguese, Galician), as well as from Latin, English and German.

The annual Going Romance conference has developed into 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. The twenty-third Going Romance conference was a very special one: for the first time it was not hosted by one of the Dutch universities, but was co-organized by the Radboud University Nijmegen and the Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis and held in France at the Maison du Séminaire in Nice from 3–5 December 2009. The present volume contains a broad range of peer-reviewed articles dealing with syntax, phonology, morphology, semantics and acquisition of the Romance languages as well as selected papers from the special workshop dealing with linguistic change in relation to linguistic theory.

Series statement "Oxford linguistics" from jacket.

Different components of grammar interact in non-trivial ways. It has been under debate what the actual range of interaction is and how we can most appropriately represent this in grammatical theory. The volume provides a general overview of various topics in the linguistics of Romance languages by examining them through the interaction of grammatical components and functions as a state-of-the-art report, but at the same time as a manual of Romance languages.

The volumes "Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory" published in the series "Current Issues in Linguistic Theory "contain the selected papers of the "Going Romance" conferences, a major European annual discussion forum for theoretically relevant research on Romance languages."Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2001" is the third such volume. It presents a selection of the papers that have been presented at the occasion of "Going Romance 2001 (XV)" which was held at the University of Amsterdam on December 6-8, 2001. The three-day program included a workshop on Determiners. The volume contains articles on specifics of one or more Romance languages or varieties: the architecture of the Determiner Phrase and properties of determiners, the left periphery of the sentence and clause structure, null elements and their interpretation, clitics, and other interesting phenomena in the Romance languages.

The Going Romance conferences are a major European annual discussion forum for theoretically relevant research on Romance languages. Selected papers are published in the Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory volumes. This is the fourth such volume, containing a selection of the papers that have been presented at the 2002 conference, which was held at the State University of Groningen. The three-day program included a workshop on Acquisition. The articles in this volume focalize on specifics of one or more Romance languages or varieties: clausal structure, verb-movement, topic, focus and reinforcement constructions, nominal ellipsis, (absence of) pronouns in child language, and other current issues in Romance linguistics.