"This volume celebrates his [Ralph Penney's] retirement in 2005 from the Chair of Spanish Linguistics at Queen Mary and Westfield College [University of London], at the age of 65"--P. 11.

This volume features fourteen papers by leading specialists on various aspects of historical morpho-syntax in the Ibero-Romance languages. In these papers, fine-grained analyses are developed to capture the richness of undiscussed or —often— previously unknown data. Comparative across the (Ibero-)Romance languages and diverse in terms of the approaches considered, ranging from cognitive-functionalist to generativist to variationist, they combine in this volume to showcase the merits of different, yet complementary, perspectives in understanding linguistic variation and language change. The gamut of phenomena scrutinised varies from morpho-phonological puzzles and word-formation to syntax and interface-related phenomena to, as a coda, methodological suggestions for future research in old Ibero-Romance; thus making it ideal reading for scholars and postgraduate students alike.

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 brief monograph explores the historical motivations for two sets of phonological changes in some varieties of Romance: restructured voicing of intervocalic /p t k/, and palatalization of initial /l/ and /n/. These developments have been treated repeatedly over the decades, yet neither has enjoyed a satisfactory solution. This book attempts to demonstrate that both outcomes are ultimately attributable to the loss of early pan-Romance consonant gemination.This study is of interest not only to the language-specific field of historical Romance linguistics, but also to general historical linguistics. The central problems examined here constitute classic cases of questions that cannot be answered by confining analysis solely to the individual languages under investigation. The passage of time, the indirect nature of fragmentary and accidental documentation, and the nature of the changes themselves conspire to deny access to the most essential facts. However, comparison of closely cognate languages now undergoing change supplies a perspective for discerning conditions that may ultimately lead to states achieved in the distant past by the languages under investigation.

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.

The book series Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, founded by Gustav Gröber in 1905, is among the most renowned publications in Romance Studies. It covers the entire field of Romance linguistics, including the national languages as well as the lesser studied Romance languages. The editors welcome submissions of high-quality monographs and collected volumes on all areas of linguistic research, on medieval literature and on textual criticism. The publication languages of the series are French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian as well as German and English. Each collected volume should be as uniform as possible in its contents and in the choice of languages.

Intonational Grammar in Ibero-Romance: Approaches across linguistic subfields is a volume of empirical research papers incorporating recent theoretical, methodological, and interdisciplinary advances in the field of intonation, as they relate to the Ibero-Romance languages. The volume brings together leading experts in Catalan, Portuguese, and Spanish, as well as in the intonation of Spanish in contact situations. The common thread is that each paper examines a specific topic related to the intonation of at least one Ibero-Romance language, framing the analysis in an experimental setting. The novel findings of each chapter hinge on critical connections that are made between the study of intonation and its related fields of linguistic inquiry, including syntax, pragmatics, sociophonetics, language acquisition and special populations. In this sense, the volume expands the traditional scope of Ibero-Romance intonation, including in it work on signed languages (LSC), individuals with autism spectrum disorder and individuals with Williams Syndrome. This volume establishes the precedent for researchers and advanced students who wish to explore the complexities of Ibero-Romance intonation. It also serves as a showcase of the most up-to-date methodologies in intonational research.

"This book examines how speakers of Ibero-Romance 'do things' with conversational units of language, paying particular attention to what they do with utterance-oriented elements such as vocatives, interjections, and particles; and to what they do with illocutionary complementisers, items attested cross-linguistically which look like, but do not behave like, subordinators. Taking the behaviour of conversation-oriented units of language as a window into the indexical nature of language, it argues that these items provide insight into how language-as-grammar builds the universe of discourse. By identifying the underlying unity in how different Ibero-Romance languages, alongside their Romance cousins and Latin ancestors, use grammar to refer-i.e. to connect our inner world to the one outside-, the book's empirical arguments are underpinned by the philosophical position that the architecture of grammar is also the architecture of thought. The book thus brings together the recent flurry of work seeking to incorporate aspects of the context of the utterance into the syntax, a line of enquiry broadly founded on empirical considerations, with the pursuit of explanatory adequacy via a so-called 'un-Cartesian' grammar of reference. In so doing, it formalises the intuition that language users do things not with words, but with grammar. The book brings new insight to the comparative morphosyntax of (Ibero-)Romance, particularly in its diatopic, diastrastic, and diamesic dimensions, and showcases the utility of careful descriptive work on this language family in advancing our empirical and conceptual understanding of the organisation of grammar"--

No detailed description available for "Studies in Romance Linguistics".

This volume contains revised versions of thirteen of the papers presented at the parasession, “New Solutions to Old Problems: Issues in Romance Historical Linguistics”, held as part of the 29th Linguistic Symposium on the Romance Languages (1999). These studies examine specific problems in Romance historical linguistics within the framework of new analytical approaches, many of which represent extensions into the diachronic realm of methodologies and theories originally formulated to explain aspects of synchronic phonology and syntax. Insights afforded by Principles and Parameters, the Minimalist Program, Optimality Theory, grammaticalization theory, and sociohistorical linguistics are used to elucidate such long-standing issues in traditional historical grammar as diphthongization in Hispano-Romance, syncope of intertonic vowels in Hispano- and Gallo-Romane, Romance lenition, the role of analogy in morphological change, word order, infinitival constructions, and the collocation of clitic object pronouns in Old French and Old Spanish.