16.653, Review: Ling Theories/Romance: Bok-Bennema et al. (2004)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-653. Sat Mar 05 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.653, Review: Ling Theories/Romance: Bok-Bennema et al. (2004)

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1)
Date: 04-Mar-2005
From: Ioana Dascalu < ioana_dascalu2000 at yahoo.ca >
Subject: Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2002 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sat, 05 Mar 2005 15:31:38
From: Ioana Dascalu < ioana_dascalu2000 at yahoo.ca >
Subject: Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2002 
 

EDITORS: Bok-Bennema, Reineke; Hollebrandse, Bart; Kampers-Manhe, 
Brigitte; Sleeman, Petra
TITLE: Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2002 
SUBTITLE: Selected papers from Going Romance, Groningen, 28-30 November 
2002 
SERIES: Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 256 
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins 
YEAR: 2004
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-3026.html


Ioana-Ruxandra Dascalu, Chair of General Linguistics, University of Craiova

OVERVIEW

"Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2002" is a collection of papers 
held at the annual Conference "Going Romance 2002" at the State University 
of Groningen, referring to Romance linguistics, with themes such as verb-
movement, topic, focus and reinforcement constructions, nominal ellipsis, 
pronouns in child language.

M. Ambar, M. Gonzaga and Esmeralda Negrao in "Tense, Quantification and 
Clause Structure in European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese" (p. 1-
17) analyze the differences between European Portuguese and Brazilian 
Portuguese in the distribution of the adverb "sempre", proposing two 
interpretations: "sempre" as a confirmative word, whereby we mean "really, 
indeed" and as a temporal one, meaning "always": European Portuguese 
displays both of these forms, while Brazilian Portuguese excludes the 
confirmative reading of the term. Preverbal and postverbal word order is a 
major difference in the use of this frequency (BP); briefly, we encounter 
two main differences between EP and BP: the absence of the confirmative 
reading in BP and the different preferred orders of temporal "sempre": 
postverbal in EP and preverbal in BP, which, being the latter language, 
undertakes a series of parametric change, different from its sources in EP.

C. de Cat in: "Early 'Pragmatic' Competence and its Implications Regarding 
the Null Subject Phenomenon" (p. 17-32) deals with the pragmatic problem 
of subject omission in the language of adults and children; as long as 
subjects are dropped in the English of adults out of pragmatic reasons and 
under linguistic conditions, in the language of children such omissions 
are ungrammatical. The author concludes that "children master the basic 
discourse notion of topic, going against the assumption that children at 
the null subject stage lack the pragmatic competence necessary to identify 
and encode topics in a target like fashion".

In another paper "On the Impact of French Subject Clitics on the 
Information Structure" (p. 36-46), C. de Cat defines two notions, that 
of "topic" as "what the sentence is about" and that of "focus" 
traditionally understood as the most informative part of the sentence, 
referring to the status of clitics as subject in French. There are two 
main interpretations of French clitics as "syntactic arguments bearing a 
theta-role" as "mere inflectional morphemes on the verb".

Several intepretations of the subject clitics occur in the bibliographies: 
(i) the XP coindexed with one such a clitic must appear outside of the 
canonical subject position  (ii) dislocated XPs are to be interpreted as 
the topic of the sentence  (iii) indefinites cannot be topics  (iv) in a 
spoken French the subject is a topic only if it is resumed by a subject 
clitic.

In spoken French, subject clitics appear only when the subject is the 
topic of the sentence and are banned when they are in focus.

Heles Contreras in "A Restricted View of Head-Movement" (p. 47-68) depicts 
the typology of head-movement, its instances and cases as : phonological 
operations, internally driven head movement and no movement with such 
applications as: inversions (T-to-C), verb raising (V-to-T) and "short" 
and "long" N-movement. According to the verb-raising phenomenon, the 
author emphasizes four types of languages, which are: V-raising and 
subject raising, V-raising and no subject raising, subject-raising and no 
V-raising, no V-raising and no subject raising. Another subject to be 
mentioned is parametric variation, which is defined by Chomsky as "the 
selection of different subsets of features from the pool made available by 
Universal Grammar and the organization of the selected features into 
lexical items in different languages (for example in English, Tense may be 
a separate lexical item, whereas in Spanish tense is a feature of the 
verb).

A more general classification of the types of head movement inversion, V-
raising, short N-movement and long N-movement divides them into three 
classes: no movement (English inversion, short N-movement in Romance), PF 
merger (English Affix Hopping) and internally driven head movement 
(Spanish raising, long N-movement) in Romance.

Laura Dominguez in "The Effects of Phonological Cues on the Syntax of 
Focus Constructions in Spanish" (p. 69-82) claims that prosody places its 
own constraints on the realization of focus and that movement of 
constituents in Spanish can be motivated by phonological factors; after 
having analyzed different types of movement available in Spanish, the 
author demonstrates the existence of correlations between phonological 
requirements and word order, showing that word order is affected by 
syntactic and prosodic requirements.

In "Optional Infinitives or Siklent Auxes -- New Evidence from Romance" 
(p. 83-98), Ch. Dye is investigating the variation of non finite matrix 
verbs instead of finite verbs in the language of children, through a 
comparison of English, Spanish, French and Italian, attempting to explain 
why children use infinitives in contexts where the adult grammar requires 
finite verbs. The purpose of the work is providing a profile of the 
differences of forms, of the selection of forms: why a given child 
language may demonstrate more than one type of form and why certain child 
language show certain types of forms and not others.

Mara Frascarelli in: "Dislocation, Clitic Resuption and Minimality. A 
Comparative Analysis of Left and Right Topic Construct Italian" (p. 99-
118) deals with the syntax of clitic-resumed dislocated constituents and 
with topics and topicalization from the point of view of A' movement. 
Italian is described as a non clitic-doubling language which allows 
multiple topics. The article is an evidence against a theory of argument 
generation for (clitic-resumed) Topic constituents.

D. Isac's study "Focus on negative Concord" (p. 119-140) is focused on 
languages which express negation more than once in a clause, that is to 
say by sentential negative markers and by so-called N-words (languages 
like Italian, Spanish, European Portuguese and Romanian). In Italian, 
Spanish and an Portuguese N-words can occur with the negative marker only 
if they are postverbal: in Romanian, N-words co-occur in the negative 
marker irrespectively of the postverbal or preverbal position; if the N-
words are used in preverbal positions  in Italian, Spanish and European 
Portuguese, they are negative quantifiers; if they are in postverbal 
position, they are Negative Polarity Items. The author accounts for two 
types of asymmetries: (i) between the preverbal and the postverbal 
position of N-words and (ii) between languages in which a preverbal N-word 
co-occurs with a negative marker (Romanian) and languages in which a 
preverbal N-word cannot co-occur with a negative marker (Italian, Spanish, 
European Portuguese).

D. Isac and Ch. Reiss in: "Romance and 'Something Else'"(p. 141-162) 
examine the syntactic and semantic properties of X-else elements 
(something else, anything else, everywhere else, nobody else). They 
emphasize two types of "else": an exclusive type which serves to exclude 
previously mentioned individuals from the set of possible referents and 
additive "else" which adds new referent to the one introduced by the 
antecedent. "Else" appears in combination with various wh-words and 
quantifiers, such as: 

A. who/what/ when/where/how else (wh-else)
B. Somebody/ everbody/ nobody else (Q-else).

It differs from "other" and "different" since, though they all express a 
comparison, "else" always contrasts subjects of different types: it allows 
only one argument to be overtly expressed whereas the constituent 
containing "other" or "different" can overtly express two arguments, the 
term of comparison and the element subject to comparison.

A.T. Pérez-Leroux, Ch. Schmitt and A. Munn in their contrastive 
article "The Development of Inalienable Possession in English and Spanish" 
(p. 199-216) analyze the definite determiner in English and Spanish and 
the inalienable construal (IC) as a sub-case of a possession relation in 
circumstances where the possessed element is a part of the possessor 
element rather than accidentally or legally related to it. English 
children allow IC of the definite determiner in non-target language 
contexts, the Spanish children allow IC more than English children in the 
singular case, English children differentiate possessives from definite 
determiners, while Spanish children distinguish the three structures (the 
simple definite, the definite + possesive and the definite + 
demonstrative).

M.T. Vinet in "-TU in Québec French as a (Super) positive Marker" (p. 235-
252) proposes the analysis of an enclitic which appears in root finite 
clauses with a variety of discursive and expressive effects; more 
specifically, -tu is an affirmative operator merger to the left of IP, the 
contexts in which -tu appears having a superpositive polarity reading or 
identifying with a question, oriented towards an affirmation in the mind 
of the speaker.

In another contrastive study, "Feature Checking and Object Clitic Omission 
in Child Catalan and Spanish" (p. 253-268) the authors K. Wexler, A. 
Gavarro and V. Torrens claim that object clitic omission in child grammar 
has a non-accidental correlation with participle agreement. Though a 
series of experiments with respect to the placement of  clitics, to the 
frequency of clitic presence or omission to the actual production of 
participle agreement in the present perfect in Catalan and the 
morphosyntactic shape of clitics produced by  children, the conclusions 
show that children speaking Catalan omit clitics more frequently than 
children speaking Spanish; up until the age of three, Catalan speaking 
children resort to omission, rather than clitic production, whereas 
Spanish children produce obligatory object clitics from the first age.

EVALUATION

The book is a collection of communications about Romance linguistics, 
concerning both individual languages and contrastive studies, mainly 
focused upon subjects of morphosyntax, such as: null subject in the 
language of adults and children, subject clitics, the typology of head-
movement, Negative Concord, the influence of prosody on syntax. A series 
of phenomena are studied through the methods of applied linguistics, 
especially language acquisition and the differences between child grammar 
and adult grammar.

REFERENCES

Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, Mass.: 
MIT Press 

Chomsky, Noam & Morris Halle. 1968. The Sound Pattern of English. New 
York: Harper & Row

Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press 

Cinque, Guglielmo. 1998. Adverbs and Functional Heads. Oxford: Oxford 
University Press 

Dobrovie-Sorin, Carmen. 1994. The Syntax of Romanian. Berlin: Mouton de 
Gruyter 

Frascarelli, Mara. 2000. The Syntax-Phonology Interface in Focus and Topic 
Cnstructions in Italian. Dordrecht: Kluwer 

Givón, Talmy. 1976. Topic, Pronoun and Grammatical Agreement. Subject and 
Topic. Ed. by C. Li, 149-211. New York: Academic Press 

Heim, Irene. 1982. The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite Noun Phrases, 
PhD Diss U. Mass 

Isac, Daniela. 1998.Sentence Negation in English and Romanian. PhD Diss. 
University of Bucharest 

Rochemont, Michael. 1986. Focus in Generative Grammar. Amsterdam: John 
Benjamins 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Ioana-Ruxandra Dascalu studied Classical Philology and Literary Theory at 
the University of Bucharest. Her main research interests go to Latin 
Linguistics (including theories of Functional Grammar), historical 
linguistics (especially the evolution from Latin to Romance languages), 
general linguistics, French linguistics (modalities, semantics and 
pragmatics), and intertextuality in ancient and modern canon.





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