This book puts together a selection of papers presented at The Romance Turn V Workshop, held in Lisbon in 2012. The papers presented at the workshop discussed general problems in the field of Language Acquisition, with a special focus on data from several Romance varieties. The papers in the volume cover a wide array of topics and subfields of acquisition studies, including L1 and L2 acquisition, typical and atypical development, acquisition of syntax, semantics, and phonology.

This volume includes a selection of papers that address a wide range of acquisition phenomena from different Romance languages and all share a common theoretical approach based on the Principles and Parameters theory. They favour, discuss and sometimes challenge traditional explanations of first and second language acquisition in terms of maturation of general principles universal to all languages. They all depart from the view that language acquisition can be explained in terms of learning language specific rules, constraints or structures. The different parts into which this volume is organized reflect different approaches that current research has offered, which deal with issues of development of reflexive pronouns, determiners, clitics, verbs, auxiliaries, Inflection, wh-movement, rssumptive pronouns, topic and focus, mood, the syntax/discourse interface, topic and focus, and null arguments.

This volume presents a collection of new articles that investigate the acquisition of Romance languages across different acquisition contexts as well as refine and propose new theoretical constructs such as complexity of linguistic features as a relevant factor forming children’s, adults’, and bilinguals’ acquisition of syntactical, morphological, and phonological structures.

This volume presents sixteen new articles on the acquisition of Romance languages by both well-established researchers and vital new contributors to the field. Under a generative umbrella, the articles in this collection investigate the acquisition of French, Romanian, Spanish, Catalan, Italian and Portuguese across different contexts including first language acquisition, bilingual acquisition, specifically impaired first language acquisition, child L2 acquisition, second language acquisition, as well as first language attrition. This volume advances our understanding of how languages are acquired and how the study of Romance languages contributes to clarifying challenging open questions on the acquisition of key functional categories and other related phenomena. In particular, the articles included assess complexity as a relevant factor shaping children’s acquisition of syntactic and phonological structures, they refine crucial theoretical constructs such as parameter setting and language transfer, and propose language change as another crucial factor affecting the process of language acquisition and attrition.

First published in 1986. This edition offers a grammatical sketch of French, with occasional comments on how other Romance languages diverge from this picture; a brief account of the sources available on language acquisition by children; and a summary of the overall course of development in children acquiring the major Romance languages. The remainder of the review takes up different facets of the language acquisition process in more detail.

This edited collection contains 13 selected papers presented at the Romance Turn IV conference, which was held at Université François Rabelais, Tours, France, in 2010. The volume reflects the diversity of interests of the contributors, not only in the learning contexts investigated (first language acquisition, typical or impaired, and bilingualism), but also in the linguistic properties being explored, in both syntax and phonology, and the languages under examination (work not only on Romance languages such as French, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, European Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish, but also comparative studies involving Basque, Modern Greek, and Cypriot Greek). Such a variety allows for multiple comparisons, which corresponds to the objective of the Romance Turn: providing an interactive platform for exchanges between researchers on the acquisition of Romance languages from a generative perspective. The volume is divided into two parts: the first part includes two papers presented as plenaries, one on L1 acquisition of morphophonology in European Portuguese (by M. João Freitas) and one on L1 acquisition of relative clauses in Italian (by Adriana Belletti), while the second part comprises 11 papers by Nikos Amvrazis, Isabel García del Real and Maria José Ezeizabarrena, Giuliana Giusti, Kleanthes Grohmann, Elaine Grolla, Virginia Hill and Mihaela Pirvulescu, Tihana Kraš, Juana Liceras, Anca Sevcenco and Larisa Avram, Katérina Palasis, and Francesca Volpato.