Fundamental Issues in the Romance Languages compares six Romance languages--Catalan, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian--and summarizes the last thirty years of scholarship in the fields of morphology, syntax, semantics, and discourse for each language. The up-to-date analyses in this volume make it essential for undergraduate and graduate students as well as scholars of each language.

Language standardization is an ongoing process based on the notions of linguistic correctness and models. This manual contains thirty-six chapters that deal with the theories of linguistic norms and give a comprehensive up-to-date description and analysis of the standardization processes in the Romance languages. The first section presents the essential approaches to the concept of linguistic norm ranging from antiquity to the present, and includes individual chapters on the notion of linguistic norms and correctness in classical grammar and rhetoric, in the Prague School, in the linguistic theory of Eugenio Coseriu, in sociolinguistics as well as in pragmatics, cognitive and discourse linguistics. The second section focuses on the application of these notions with respect to the Romance languages. It examines in detail the normative grammar and the normative dictionary as the reference tools for language codification and modernization of those languages that have a long and well-established written tradition, i.e. Romanian, Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish, and Portuguese. Furthermore, the volume offers a discussion of the key issues regarding the standardization of the ‘minor’ Romance languages as well as Creoles.

This Cambridge History is the most comprehensive survey of the history of the Romance languages ever published in English. It engages with new and original topics that reflect wider-ranging comparative concerns, such as the relation between diachrony and synchrony, morphosyntactic typology, pragmatic change, the structure of written Romance, and lexical stability. Volume I is organized around the two key recurrent themes of persistence (structural inheritance and continuity from Latin) and innovation (structural change and loss in Romance). An important and novel aspect of the volume is that it accords persistence in Romance a focus in its own right rather than treating it simply as the background to the study of change. In addition, it explores the patterns of innovation (including loss) at all linguistic levels. The result is a rich structural history which marries together data and theory to produce new perspectives on the structural evolution of the Romance languages.

The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages is the most exhaustive treatment of the Romance languages available today. Leading international scholars adopt a variety of theoretical frameworks and approaches to offer a detailed structural examination of all the individual Romance varieties and Romance-speaking areas, including standard, non-standard, dialectal, and regional varieties of the Old and New Worlds. The book also offers a comprehensive comparative account of major topics, issues, and case studies across different areas of the grammar of the Romance languages. The volume is organized into 10 thematic parts: Parts 1 and 2 deal with the making of the Romance languages and their typology and classification, respectively; Part 3 is devoted to individual structural overviews of Romance languages, dialects, and linguistic areas, while Part 4 provides comparative overviews of Romance phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics, and sociolinguistics. Chapters in Parts 5-9 examine issues in Romance phonology, morphology, syntax, syntax and semantics, and pragmatics and discourse, respectively, while the final part contains case studies of topics in the nominal group, verbal group, and the clause. The book will be an essential resource for both Romance specialists and everyone with an interest in Indo-European and comparative linguistics.

Language standardization is an ongoing process based on the notions of linguistic correctness and models. This manual contains thirty-six chapters that deal with the theories of linguistic norms and give a comprehensive up-to-date description and analysis of the standardization processes in the Romance languages. The first section presents the essential approaches to the concept of linguistic norm ranging from antiquity to the present, and includes individual chapters on the notion of linguistic norms and correctness in classical grammar and rhetoric, in the Prague School, in the linguistic theory of Eugenio Coseriu, in sociolinguistics as well as in pragmatics, cognitive and discourse linguistics. The second section focuses on the application of these notions with respect to the Romance languages. It examines in detail the normative grammar and the normative dictionary as the reference tools for language codification and modernization of those languages that have a long and well-established written tradition, i.e. Romanian, Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish, and Portuguese. Furthermore, the volume offers a discussion of the key issues regarding the standardization of the ‘minor’ Romance languages as well as Creoles.

TESOL / ESL Teaching.

Current theoretical approaches to language devote great attention to macro- and micro-variation and show an ever-increasing interest in minority languages. In this respect, few empirical domains are as rich and lively as the Italo-Romance languages, which together with Albanian were the main research domain of Leonardo M. Savoia. The volume covers areas as different as phonology, morphology, syntax and the lexicon. A broad range of Romance languages is considered, as well as Albanian, Greek and Hungarian, shedding new light on many classical topics. The first section focuses on morphosyntax, both in the narrow sense and with regard to its interfaces. The second section focuses on clitics and pronouns. The third section deals with a number of issues in phonology and syntax-phonology interface. The last section turns the reader’s attention beyond formal linguistics itself and examines variation in the light of neurosciences, pathology, historical linguistics and political discourse.