New Analyses in Romance Linguistics: Selected Papers From the XVIII Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages, Urbana-Champaign, April 7-9, 1988 (Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguis

The twenty papers from the eighteenth Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages deal with diverse aspects of the Romance languages and Romance linguistics. They reflect the current state of Romance studies in North America and of the particular outlook among the international group of contributors and participants to LSRL 18. The thriving research front accords central importance to formal questions of synchronic analysis. The group of seven historical and typological papers amounts to a strong alternative. Several papers treat the group of Romance languages not only as a well-defined, almost exclusive research province, but move from Romance phenomena outward to other language types, even to genuinely universal dimensions. Other contributions maintain a more circumscribed outlook exploiting the typological closeness of the Romance idioms for improved analyses. Three invited contributions by Georg Bossong, Yves Charles-Morin and Maria-Luisa Rivero on typological, phonological and syntactic questions set the tone for the volume.