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What are the linguistic means for expressing different types of foci such as (narrow) information focus and contrastive focus in Romance languages, and why are there such differing views on such a presumably clear-cut research subject? Bringing together original expert work from a variety of linguistic disciplines and perspectives such as language acquisition and language contact, this volume provides a state-of-the-art discussion on central issues of focus realization. These include the interaction between prosody, syntax, and pragmatics, the typology of word order and intonation languages, the differentiation between focus and related notions such as contrast and presupposed modality, and the role of synchronic variation and change.

The Romance Languages document remarkable variations in subject word order in different constructions, and have various restrictions in their occurrence. No consensus has emerged on what the paramaters are for such variations. This volume does not attempt to create a consensus, but tries to represent and bring into dialogue the different sides of the debate.

In The Syntactic Recoverability of Null Arguments Roberge studies the syntactic properties of subject and object clitic pronouns in several Romance languages and dialects from the perspective of the Principles-and-Parameters framework in generative grammar. He is able to make important claims through a comparative study of various rarely discussed French dialects, Spanish dialects, and Italian, and concludes that French should be analysed as a null subject language like many others in the Romance family.

Stylistic fronting (SF) is an optional syntactic phenomenon whereby a lexical item that may belong to various syntactic categories fronts to a pre-finite-V position, if no subject is merged in SpecIP. The literature reports that SF is productive in Icelandic and Old Scandinavian, and it is also attested in some Old Romance languages (Old Catalan, Old French). This article presents a phase-based analysis of SF in Old Italian. In this language, SF has some previously undiscussed characteristics. A corpus study shows that Old Italian displays a root/nonroot asymmetry in the typology of fronting items. In root clauses, nominal elements, such as nominal predicates with a special semantics, front more frequently than verbal elements (infinitives, past participles), which most frequently front in nonroot clauses. Since fronting in root clauses is intrinsically ambiguous with topicalization and focalization, it is not considered SF and is not extensively discussed in this article. By contrast, I analyze as proper SF the fronting operation that occurs in nonroot clauses, and I argue that this is a movement anchoring the event-structure (vP) semantic content to the context (FinP). This type of movement is possible only if vP is not a phase and no intervening agentive external argument is merged in SpecvP. The fronted material is pragmatically presupposed and interpreted as the subject of predication. Pragmatics tests corroborate the argument.

In this article I provide an analysis of XVS order in (Modern) standard French, and reconcile it with comparative analyses of XVS in (Modern) Romance by taking into account recent conceptual accounts for topic and focus. I concentrate on XVS clauses in Modern standard French where X is an adverbial or an adjectival phrase, and provide empirical evidence for the assumption that – contrary to what is often assumed – these are similar to XVS clauses in Romance and not subject to a special syntactic licensing constraint distinguishing them from other Romance languages. I claim that XVS clauses in (Modern) standard French display systematicity in that the initial element X is either [+anaphoric] or [+scalar] and that this is the result of micro-parametric rather than nano-parametric variation: the sentence-initial AdjPs and AdvPs in XVS are no individual lexical items but belong to a lexically defined subset of AdvPs and AdjPs. Instances of XVS introduced by a [+scalar] constituent are argued to be subsets of Romance mirative focus fronting, while those introduced by a [+anaphoric] constituent are subsets of Romance resumptive preposing. I argue that XVS in standard French is productive with fronted rare ‘rare’ and nombreux ‘numerous’, because these adjectives are both [+anaphoric] and [+scalar]. This shows that V2 is still active in standard French.

The book series Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 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 series publishes high-quality monographs and collected volumes on all areas of linguistic research, on medieval literature and on textual criticism.

The volume presents recent results in the field of Information Structure based on research on Italian and Italian dialects, and on further studies on several typologically different languages. The central idea is that Information Structure is not an exclusive matter of syntax but an interface issue which involves the interplay of at least the phonological, morpho-syntactic and semantic-pragmatic levels of analysis. In addition, the volume is based on the study of actual language use and it adopts a cross-linguistic point of view.

It is quite remarkable that, after over a half-century of research in generative grammar, there is still uncertainty and debate surrounding the analysis of preverbal subjects in a number of null-subject languages. The implications of this debate are far-reaching for generative theory: if preverbal subjects are analyzed as non-arguments, it calls into question the proposed universality of the EPP (as in e.g. Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou 1998), as well as its associated features and feature-strengths. Galician, spoken in the northwest of Spain, is an under-documented Romance language within the generative paradigm. In this book, the author details an experimental program for establishing clausal word order appropriateness and preferences in a variety of information structure contexts, while informing theoretical debate on preverbal subjects. The experimental methodology and information structure assumptions employed create several testable predictions. The statistical data suggest that Galician is a predominantly SVO language and that preverbal subjects behave like canonical subjects, and not CLLD constituents. The empirical data discussed inform the modified model of the preverbal field that the author proposes for Galician, which takes into account a number of recent analyses of Western Iberian Romance clausal phenomena such as the enclisis-proclisis divide, topicalization, focalization, and recomplementation.

European Portuguese, like other Romance languages, display a great amount of word order variation. Out of the six logically possible permutations between Subject, Verb and Complement in a transitive sentence, five are possible: SVO, VSO, VOS, OVS and OSV. The primary goal of this book is to provide an analysis of the several positions where the subject may surface in European Portuguese. Departing from an architecture of the clause as sketched in early minimalist work, containing two subject-related functional categories above VP (AgrP and TP), it is shown that the subject may surface in all potential landing sites: Spec,AgrP, Spec,TP and Spec,VP. Moreover, just like any other argument of the clause, it is claimed that subjects also have the possibility of surfacing in a left-dislocated position, arguably adjoining to the clause's left periphery. It is shown that there is no free variation. Each of these positions may be occupied by the subject, only if two requirements are met: i) The position is made available by syntax; ii) The position does not violate any interface condition. In other words, the following model is argued for: syntax generates legitimate outputs. At the interface levels, each output may be selected or filtred out, according to requirements of the interface. The picture emerging from the proposal made in this book is the following: syntax proper does not need to refer to conditions best placed at the interface. All that is needed from syntax is that it generates an array of well-formed outputs. Such outputs may be evaluated a posteriori by each of the interfaces. If they meet requirements of the interface, they are selected as legitimate. If, on the contrary, some interface condition is violated, they are ruled out. Under this approach, three in-dependent results are derived: i) an explanation is found for the patterns of word order variation; ii) syntax proper may be reduced to its own tools, not having to manipulate semantic, discourse or prosodic variables; iii) the intuition that European Portuguese is an SVO language is derived: this word order corresponds to the one in which the subject occupies the only specifier position in which the other interfaces play no role.

This monograph examines how language contributes to the social coordination of actions in talk-in-interaction. Focusing on a set of frequently used constructions in French (left-dislocation, right-dislocation, topicalization, and hanging topic), the study provides an empirically rich contribution to the understanding of grammar as thoroughly temporal, emergent, and contingent upon its use in social interaction. Based on data from a range of everyday interactions, the authors investigate speakers' use of these constructions as resources for organizing social interaction, showing how speakers continuously adapt, revise, and extend grammatical trajectories in real time in response to local contingencies. The book is designed to be both informative for the specialized scholar and accessible to the graduate student familiar with conversation analysis and/or interactional linguistics.