From Latin through the Romance languages, which types of past participle survived? Which older, "irregular" types disappeared and which older, "regular" types proliferated? Which new types of past participles emerged, which proved popular in standard Romance languages, and which exist in a wide range of dialects? The author explores reasons for the expansion or contraction of each type, in each area.

This volume contains revised versions of papers given at a conference at the Manoir de Brion, in Normandy. They deal with phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics, and cover a wide range of Romance languages, including many lesser-known varieties. The contributors to the volume are committed to the view that Romance Linguistics is not narrowly philological, but is rather General Linguistics practised with reference to particular data. The point has been made many times, but is worth reiterating, that Latin and the Romance languages offer an unrivalled wealth of synchronic and historical documentation, and provide both a stimulus and a test-bed for ideas about language structure, language change, and language variation. Many of the papers in this volume can be interpreted simultaneously as using the analytical tools of linguistic theory to illuminate the structure of individual Romance languages or of the family as a whole, and as using Romance data to throw light on general problems in linguistic theory, or on the structure of languages beyond Romance. Specific areas covered include: prosodic domains; quantification; agreement; the prepositional accusative; clitic pronouns; voice and aspect.

The monograph focuses on the typological differences between the four most widely spoken Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian) and Czech. Utilizing data from InterCorp, the parallel corpus project of the Czech National Corpus, the book analyses various categories (expression of potential non-volitional participation, iterativity, causation, beginning of an action and adverbial subordination) to discover differences and similarities between Czech and the Romance languages. Due to the massive amount of data mined, as well as the high number of languages examined, the monograph presents general and individual typological features of the four Romance languages and Czech that often exceed what has previously been accepted in the field of comparative linguistics.

The annual Going Romance conference is the major European discussion forum for theoretically relevant research on Romance languages where current ideas about language in general and about Romance languages in particular are tested. Starting with the thirteenth conference held in 1999, volumes with selected papers of the conferences are published under the title Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory, This is the fifth such volume, containing a selection of papers that have been presented at the seventeenth Going Romance conference, held at the Radboud University Nijmegen (The Netherlands) from 20–22 November 2003. The three-day program included a workshop on 'Diachronic Phonology'. The present volume contains a broad range of articles dealing not only with syntax and phonology, but also with morphology, semantics and acquisition of the Romance languages.

Are the past participial forms that occur in passive and perfect periphrases substantially identical or should they rather be distinguished into accidentally homophonous passive and perfect(ive) participles? This book discusses the long-standing mystery of past participial (non-)identity on the basis of a broad range of synchronic data from Germanic and Romance, eventually focussing on German and English as these draw the most relevant distinctions (e.g. auxiliary alternation, a passive auxiliary that is not BE). Together with some contrastive insights from Slavic as well as the diachrony of passive and perfect periphrases, this clearly points to an identity-view. The novel approach that is laid out suggests that past participles conflate diathetic and aspectual properties. The former cause the suppression of an external argument, whereas the latter impose event-structure sensitive perfectivity, which only induces the completion of a situation if the underlying eventuality denotes a simple change of state. An approach along these lines sheds light on the intricate properties of past participles and the auxiliaries they occur with, the determinants of auxiliary selection as well as the interplay of argument and event structure.