LINGUIST List 21.2456 Thu Jun 03 2010 Review: General Ling: Masullo, O'Rourke, & Huang (2009) Editor for this issue: Monica Macaulay <monicalinguistlist.org> This LINGUIST List issue is a review of a book published by one of our supporting publishers, commissioned by our book review editorial staff. We welcome discussion of this book review on the list, and particularly invite the author(s) or editor(s) of this book to join in. If you are interested in reviewing a book for LINGUIST, look for the most recent posting with the subject "Reviews: AVAILABLE FOR REVIEW", and follow the instructions at the top of the message. You can also contact the book review staff directly. Directory         1.    Christopher Sams, Romance Linguistics 2007 Message 1: Romance Linguistics 2007 Date: 03-Jun-2010 From: Christopher Sams <samscsfasu.edu> Subject: Romance Linguistics 2007 E-mail this message to a friend Discuss this message Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/20/20-1792.html EDITORS: Masullo, Pascual José; O'Rourke, Erin; Huang, Chia-Hui TITLE: Romance Linguistics 2007 SUBTITLE: Selected Papers from the 37th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), Pittsburgh, 15-18 March 2007 SERIES TITLE: Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 304 PUBLISHER: John Benjamins YEAR: 2009 Christopher D. Sams, Department of English, Stephen F. Austin State University INTRODUCTION Romance Linguistics 2007 is a collection of papers which are based on presentations at the 37th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), held in Pittsburgh in March of 2007. The aim of the conference and resulting publication is to promote ''advances in theoretical research on Romance Languages.'' The papers cover a wide variety of the subdisciplines of Romance Linguistics such as phonetics, phonology, morphology, language acquisition, typology, and historical linguistics. The papers are organized alphabetically by the author's last name. SUMMARY In Gabriela Alboiu's paper ''Null Expletives and Case: The View from Romance'', she argues within the Minimalist framework that structural Case agreement (phi features) which relies on the phrase head ''is not compulsory for either Case licensing or for obtaining a Case value.'' She provides examples in Romanian, Spanish, Ancient Greek, and both Old and Modern Italian. Deborah Arteaga's paper ''On the Existence of Null Complementizers in Old French'' examines data from Old and Modern French to argue that rather than instances of parataxis, null complementizers in Old French were ''lexically selected CPs with an EPP feature in C'', and that the EPP feature of subordinate C was lost in the evolution from Old French to Modern French. ''On the Lack of Transparency Effects in French'' by J.-Marc Authier and Lisa A. Reed argues that Modern French ''has no transparency effects of the restructuring kind'' and concludes that restructuring verbs fall into one of three parametric categories: A) restructuring verbs are either lexical or functional, B) restructuring verbs are lexical, and C) restructuring verbs are functional. They claim that diachronic development in French can be categorized and accounted for according to these parameters. Travis G. Bradley's paper ''On the Syllabification of prevocalic /w/ in Judeo-Spanish'' examines (using the faithfulness and markedness constraints of Optimality Theory) some Judeo-Spanish dialects in which the labiovelar glide /w/ is realized as secondary labialization on a preceding consonant. ''Word Order and Minimalism'' was based on an outreach talk to non-specialists by Heles Contreras. He suggests that it is the ''lack of ordering stipulations'', and not a basic word order with accompanying 'movement' operations, that can account for 'free' word order. He draws on examples from Spanish, Warlpiri, Portuguese, and Italian. In ''The Status of Old French Clitics in the 12th Century'', Jennifer Culbertson argues that rather than being proclitics on simple, finite verbs, French clitics in the 12th century were ''enclitics obeying independent constraints on positioning.'' Anamaria Falaus in ''Towards a Unified Account of Positive and Negative Polarity: Evidence from Romanian'' presents empirical data supporting the claim that negative polarity items and positive polarity are sensitive to the semantic property antimorphy. Based on his plenary lecture, Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach's ''Correlativization and Degree Quantification in Spanish'' analyzes (paraphrasing from the abstract) the syntactic and semantic properties of Spanish degree-relative constructions and defends a movement analysis that is in line with recent cross-linguistic research on correlatives. ''Imperfect Variation and Class Marking in the Old Spanish Third Conjugation'' by Nicholas C. Henriksen follows Penny's 1972 work on Spanish root vowel morphology. The papers examines data from four Old Spanish texts and assesses the role of verb class in determining the Old Spanish imperfect endings ie vs. ia. ''Licensing Negative Fragments and the Interpretation of Comparison'' by Simona Herdan explores how negative elements (such as 'never') are licensed in Romanian elliptical and comparative/equative structures where no overt negation is present. Her analysis relies on Bošković's (to appear) feature checking analysis. Based on her plenary lecture ''Developing I-Language in L1 and L2'', Julia Herschensohn addresses (based on Chomsky 1986) whether L2 grammars should be classified as I-Language or E-Language. Examples come from French and Italian. ''Crypto-Variation in Italian Velar Palatalization'' by Martin Krämer is an empirical study in which he devises a nonce word list and elicits native Italian informants' judgments to gain an understanding of the synchronic status of Italian velar palatalization. His results (analyzed in the Optimality Theory framework) suggest that there is a uniform, yet ambiguous surface pattern which is analyzed in different ways by different speakers. Juan Martín's paper ''Antisymmetry and the Typology of Relative Clauses: Syntactic and Morphological Evidence from Spanish'' examines two different types of syntactic structures for Spanish relative clauses: the first ''is derived by NP-raising where the relative clause is selected by the determiner'' (Kayne 1994), and the second type is a ''matching structure which involves operator movement.'' ''Romance Paths as Cognate Complements: A Lexical-Syntactic Account'' by Jaume Mateu and Gemma Rigau analyzes some Path constructions that ''appear to contradict Talmy's (1991, 2000) typological predictions.'' The authors draw on Hale and Keyser's (2000) analysis on 'P-Cognation' where phrasal verbs in Italian and Catalan involve a lexical-syntactic patterns where the directional particle that specifies the Path element has already been conflated with the verb, i.e. the verb itself codes the meaning that is further specified by the P(ath) particle. In Rebecca E. Ronquest and Manuel Díaz-Campos' paper ''Discriminating Pitch Accent Alignment in Spanish'', the authors present a study of perceptual data to determine whether participants could distinguish between two pitch accents in Spanish declaratives, and their findings suggest that listeners could not distinguish between two pitch accent alignments. ''Proscriptions...Gaps...and Something in Between: An Experimental Examination of Spanish Phonotactics'' by Michael Shelton, Chip Gerfen, and Nicolás Gutiérrez Palma examines phonotactic sequences that are phonologically prohibited, historical gaps, and fully-licit controls and argues that a more gradient approach to syllable weight (rather than binary, i.e., light or heavy) can more accurately describe that data. Laura Spinu's paper ''Romanian Palatalization: The Role of Place of Articulation in Perception'' examines Romanian speakers' perception of labial versus coronal fricatives and concludes that Romanian speakers have a higher sensitivity to plain-palatalized contrast in labials rather than coronals. ''Putting the Spanish Determiner Phrase in Order'' by M. Emma Ticio argues that right specifiers, stylistic movements, and massive overt movements are not needed to explain PP arguments within Spanish DPs. She proposes that different properties and chain resolution at the phonological interface account for the differences in hierarchical and surface orders. In Irene Vogel and Laura Spinu's paper ''The Domain of Palatalization in Romanian'', they demonstrate that word final /i/ in Romanian (usually pronounced as a glide or a palatal property associated with the previous segment) is (paraphrasing from the abstract) not a phonological process that affects the right side of the word, but rather the context for the phenomenon is between the Phonological Word and the Phonological phrase--a Composite Group. ''Rhotic Metathesis Asymmetries in Romance: Formalizing the Effects of Articulation and Perception on Sound Change'' by Eric Russell Webb and Travis G. Bradley examine rhotic metathesis as the traditional account of listeners interpreting the elongated [low F3] formant does not account for all of the cases since ''no single phonetic property unifies this class of rhotics.'' The final paper ''The Left Edge in the Spanish Clausal Structure'' by Maria Luisa Zubizarreta examines the left-edge part of clauses in Standard Spanish as compared to Italian and Caribbean Spanish. Standard Spanish has both VSO order and subject inversion in informational questions, She argues that the left-most edge in the I-domain is the projection of phi-P ('rich agreement'). EVALUATION Given the scope of the volume, I will keep my comments rather general. On the whole, this volume deals with novel research and well-established theoretical models. The papers are of great benefit to someone wishing to evaluate current issues in Romance linguistics. Some of the papers offer new theories and data, while others offer a look at well-known data in a new view. The intended audience are Romance Linguists, but a very current and thorough knowledge of both Minimalism and Optimality Theory is required to follow most of the in-depth discussions. In terms of organization, the volume would have benefited greatly from grouping the papers by language or by subdiscipline rather than alphabetically by the author's last name. In looking at the languages represented, the papers were Spanish and French heavy, although it is refreshing to see so many papers dealing with Romanian, which can be often overlooked. Not knowing the conference program and the quality of the papers, it would have been nice to see Italian, Catalan, and the non-present Portuguese better represented in the data. Another innovation would have been better cohesion between the papers; some of the papers overlapped material and could have cross referenced each other. The formatting is also more or less consistent, although some of the articles opt for tree diagrams and others the use of a bracket representation of syntactic relations, which was very difficult to read in some cases. It is also refreshing that many of the papers were so well researched and in depth, but also mentioned more general typological implications where applicable. REFERENCES Bošković, Željko. (To appear). ''Licensing Negative Constituents and Negative Concord.'' Proceedings of the 38th North East Linguistic Society (NELS), Ottawa, 26-28 October 2007. Amherst, MA: GSLA Publications. Chomsky, Noam. (1986). ''Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use. New York: Praeger. Hale, Kenneth & Samuel J. Keyser (2000). ''Aspect and the Syntax of Argument Structure.'' Ms., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. Downloadable at http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/events/tributes/hale/index.html. Kayne, Richard. (1994). ''The Antisymmetry of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Penny, Ralph. (1972). ''Verb Class as a Determiner of Stem Vowel in the Historical Morphology of Spanish Verbs''. Revue de Linguistique Romane 36.343-359. Talmy, Leonard. (2000). ''Toward a Cognitive Semantics, vol.2. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Talmy, Leonard. (1991). ''Path to Realization: A Typology of Event Conflation.'' Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 17.480-519. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Linguistics Society. ABOUT THE REVIEWER Christopher Sams earned a Ph.D. in Hispanic Linguistics (Romance Linguistics Specialization) from SUNY Buffalo in May 2009. He has taught courses in Spanish, French, Italian, English, and Linguistics. His research centers around linguistic typology, Romance Linguistics, and Forensic Linguistics. Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue Page Updated: 03-Jun-2010       About LINGUIST    |   Contact Us       While the LINGUIST List makes every effort to ensure the linguistic relevance of sites listed on its pages, it cannot vouch for their contents.