Selected papers from the 48th annual Linguistics Symposium on Romance Languages (Toronto, 2018), presenting contemporary issues and novel ideas bridging across various areas of linguistics, in a wide variety of Romance languages past and present.

This volume contains a selection of 18 peer-reviewed papers presented at the 31st edition of Going Romance. Phenomena found in Romance languages (European Portuguese, French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian), in Romance dialects (Cosentino, Salentino, southern Calabrese, Neapolitan, and Trevigiano), and even in creoles with a Romance lexifier (Makista and Kristang) either benefit from in-depth analyses confined to one single variety, or are subjected to comparative analysis (dialect vs standard language, dialect vs different major language(s), cross-dialectal comparison, cross-Romance comparison, and even comparison of language families). Theoretical and experimental approaches complement one another, as do diachrony and synchrony. Individually and as a whole, these contributions show how the Romance languages contribute to a better understanding of issues which are relevant in the current linguistic landscape: acquisition, n-words, ellipsis phenomena, focus and polarity, ditransitive constructions, grammaticalization theory, differential object marking, language ecology, event structure, cyclicity, passives and many more.

This collection of twenty articles, selected from the 33rd annual Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages held at Indiana University in 2003, presents current theoretical approaches to a variety of issues in Romance linguistics. Invited speakers Luigi Burzio and Jose Ignacio Hualde contribute papers on the paradigmatics and syntagmatics of Italian verbal inflection and comparative/diachronic Romance intonation, respectively. The other papers, whose authors include both well-known researchers and younger scholars, represent such areas as French syntax (both synchronic and diachronic), second language acquisition (Spanish & English), Spanish intonation, phonology, syntax, and semantics, Italian semantics, Romanian morphology and syntax, Catalan phonology and morphology, and Galician phonology (two papers). The volume is rounded out by three explicitly comparative studies, one on proto-Romance phonology, one on microvariation in Romance syntax, and a third addressing syntactic microvariation among varieties of French and French-based creoles. Frameworks represented include Optimality Theory, Minimalism, and Construction Grammar.

This volume contains a peer reviewed selection of invited contributions, papers and posters that were presented at the 2018 venue of Going Romance (XXXII) in Utrecht (a four day program that included two thematic workshops). The papers all discuss data and formalized analyses of one or more Romance languages or dialects, in either synchronic or diachronic perspective, and pay particular attention to the variation and the actual variability that is at stake, not only in syntax and morpho-syntax but also in semantics and phonology. Beyond the discussion of differences between languages and/or dialects from a formalist perspective, the volume also contains a number of papers linking the theme of variation to sociolinguistic issues such as natural bilingualism and micro-contact.

This book presents an enlightening collection of papers contributing to theoretical discussions across many topics within the study of Romance Languages and Linguistics. The work originates from the 29th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages held in 1999 at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, although only a small subpart of the proceedings papers are included in this volume. The selected papers have been reworked for the current publication.

The papers collected in this volume reflect the numerous interests in the field of Romance languages and Romance linguistics today. A far-ranging amount of Romance data are presented: French, Italian, and Spanish dialect data are crucial to several authors' arguments, Rumanian is the focus of two papers, and many of the papers included discuss overall Romance developments. It is noteworthy that formal approaches to syntax are here regularly applied to historical data (three papers specifically deal with pro-drop phenomena in Old French). Of the papers on phonology, syllabification and linking processes receive much attention.

The chapters in this book represent the theme of “bridges” – bridging research approaches and directions across languages, methodologies and disciplines. Alongside descriptive and theoretical studies, the contributions present experimental studies addressing issues in syntax, phonetics-phonology and sociolinguistics. And alongside investigations of linguistic phenomena in standard Romance language varieties, other investigations address less well-known and studied, minority and endangered varieties (e.g., Quebec French, Brazilian Portuguese, Romanian, Galician, Catalan and Palenquero) from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. Romance languages in contact with other languages and bilingualism, now also integral aspects of the field, are reflected in this volume as well, including less well-known cases of contemporary contact of Serbian with Romanian, and earlier contact of African languages with Spanish and Portuguese. This volume thus continues the decades long tradition of the Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages of embracing cutting-edge developments in the field.