This is a collection of articles describing and analyzing several of the most important morphosyntactic features for which the formal comparison between Basque and its surrounding Romance languages is relevant, such as word order, inflection, case, argument structure and causatives. In the context of a language virtually all of whose speakers are bilingual in either Spanish or French, the theoretically informed in-depth description offered in this volume focuses on the fine grain of linguistic structures from languages typologically quite apart but coexisting and probably interacting in the minds of speakers. It therefore aims at shedding some light on the types of interactions between different systems and on the systems themselves.

This volume contains fifteen articles on current theoretical issues in Basque and Romance linguistics. Even though Basque and Romance languages are typologically different and have different genetic origins, one thousand years of coexistence have shown certain parallelisms in their respective grammars. It is Mario Saltarelli that first offered a formal linguistic account of phonological and syntactic phenomena that occur in these two language groups. Thus, this compilation of articles in both Basque and Romance linguistics not only pays tribute to Saltarelli s work by acknowledging his formalization of this relational insight, but also comprises state of the art research on languages with strong geographical and historical kinship.Fifteen reviewed articles written by sixteen top scholars in the field provide fresh analyses of long standing challenging phenomena in Romance and Basque linguistics such as geminates, the evolution of Basque plosives, clitic doubling, clitic clustering, directionality of clitization, the role of agreement, focus, the interaction of voice and aspect, unaccusativity, semantic interpretation and syntactic structure of Determiner Phrases, obviation, control, and anaphoric and pronominal binding. This variety of topics however is unified by limiting the contributions to the four major formal areas of linguistics, and to one single framework, Generative Grammar, although in some of its many incarnations such as Minimalism, Optimality Theory, and Relational Grammar. All this, along with the number of languages covered by the authors (Aragonese, Basque, Catalan, French, Galician, Gascon, Italian and many of its dialects (Ligurian, Piedmontese, Tuscan...), Classical and Late Latin, Occitan, Brazilian and European Portuguese, Romanian, Old and Modern Spanish among others), makes the book of great value to any linguist working in Romance or Basque linguistics.

The Basques are Europe's oldest people, their origins a mystery, their language related to no other on Earth, and even though few in population and from a remote and rugged corner of Spain and France, they have had a profound impact on the world. Whilst inward-looking, preserving their ancient language and customs, the Basques also struck out for new horizons, pioneers of whaling and cod fishing, leading the way in exploration of the Americas and Asia, were among the first capitalists and later led Southern Europe's industrial revolution. Mark Kurlansky, the author of the acclaimed Cod, blends human stories with economic, political, literary and culinary history to paint a fascinating picture of an intriguing people.

This book aims to provide a better understanding of convergence and non-convergence phenomena, such as divergence, from different theoretical perspectives. It brings together nine case studies that deal with contact between languages found in the Iberian Peninsula (Castilian, Catalan, Portuguese and Basque), between Spanish or Portuguese and another language (such as English), and between different varieties from Europe and other continents. The volume thus unites views from two fields that rarely interact: contact linguistics and dialectology. It discusses the mechanisms and consequences of language contact within the Ibero-Romance world, a geographical space characterised by a high rate of multilingual speakers and settings. The contributions deal with various combinations of convergence and divergence, for example between different varieties of the same language, language stability despite contact, as well as less studied aspects, such as the relation between language contact and second language acquisition, the linguistic landscape perspective of language contact, and divergence in linguistic identity construction.

Questions related to the origin and history of the Basque language spark considerable interest, since it is the only surviving pre-Indo-European language in western Europe. However, until now, there was no readily available source in English providing answers to these questions or giving an overview of past and current research in this area. This book is intended to partly fill this void. The book contains both state-of-the-art papers which summarize our knowledge about particular areas of Basque historical linguistics, and articles presenting new hypotheses and points of view based on hard evidence and careful analysis. All contributors to this volume have demonstrated expertise in the topic within Basque historical linguistics that their chapter addresses. Two classical articles by the late Luis Michelena are included in English translation. In addition, the book includes studies on diachronic phonology, morphology and syntax. The relation of Basque to other languages is also investigated in a couple of chapters.

This book is the first comprehensive treatment of the phonological system of Basque available in English. Basque is a morphologically rich and fairly regular language with a number of active phonological rules that are limited to certain morphological environments. In addition, it has a high degree of dialectical fragmentation. These characteristics of Basque make this language a good test ground to investigate the interaction of phonological rules both with each other and with morphological processes, which the author does within the Lexical Phonology framework. The effects of rule interaction on feature geometry are a major concern - how phonological operations modify underlying structures and how the structures created by one phonological rule can serve as input to other rules. These effects are examined in a study of the rather peculiar behaviour of Basque affricates. Another area which requires particular attention, and in which Basque dialects differ widely, is prosody. Along with stress-accent systems of different types, Basque also possesses pitch-accent or restricted tonal systems in some of its western dialects. This book should be of interest to advanced students and teachers of linguistics, especially Romance linguistics and lexical phonology.

This volume is an attempt to expound the current state of research into the past of the Basque language. The research has experienced that more evidence have been discovered, and what we already knew has been more deeply studied. Since the 70s cross-linguistic typology has made huge progress in our knowledge of linguistic universals and grammaticalization paths.