This volume contains 17 studies on historical Romance linguistics within a variety of current theoretical frameworks; it includes studies on phonology, morphology and syntax, focusing solely or comparatively on all five ‘major’ Romance languages: French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish.… read more
This chapter evaluates methodological inquiries to L2 acquisition (L2A) of French syntax and approaches used to carry them out. Over four decades, a range of theoretical approaches to L2 French syntax have prevailed in North America, Asia and Europe. For example, the generative or Universal… read more
Sáez (2011), to account for Spanish definite articles in ellipsis contexts, such as mi libro y el [e] de Juan ‘my book and that of John’, proposes the Stress Condition on Remnants (SCR), which disallows unstressed syntactic elements to be anaphoric, while allowing definite articles to license empty… read more
This chapter focuses on the syntax of the subjunctive in Old French (OF), comparing it to Modern French (MF). In MF, obviation effects occur between the subject of a volitional complement and the subject the embedded clause (Ruwet 1984): (1) *Je veux que je parte. *I want-1sg that I leave-1sg-subj… read more
This paper considers restrictive relatives in OF, of the type Car ne voi tertre nen soeit rases “For I see no small hill (that) is not razed to the ground”. We note that unlike MF, in OF, the relative pronoun qui could be unexpressed in such structures. OF bare subject relatives, we argue, are not… read more
This paper considers two types of genitive constructions in Old French (OF), one in which the possessor is introduced by a preposition (type un ami à moi “my friend”/l’ami du roi “the king’s friend”) and another, in which no overt preposition is found (type la niece le duc “the duke’s niece”), the… read more
This paper considers apparent null complementizers in Old French, a phenomenon typically considered by philologists to be parataxis, or a juxtaposition of two main clauses (cf. Foulet 1982, Jensen 1990, Moignet 1988); recent studies within the Minimalist framework (e.g., Bošković & Lasnik 2003,… read more
