Workshop 'Non-Romance features in Romance languages'

This year's Going Romance Workshop will be on non-Romance features in Romance languages

Non-Romance features in Romance languages

We invite papers that provide a theoretical account of non-Romance features attested in Romance languages. By ‘non-Romance features’, we refer to morphosyntactic, semantic and phonological properties of Romance that transcend Romance proper, in the sense that they are attested in non-Romance languages as well, suggesting a common, more fundamental account in terms of the theory of grammar.
 
Examples of phenomena that are of interest in this context include crosslinguistic properties of pro-drop, residual V2, and subject inversion. In the DP domain, one might think of suffixal definite articles in Romanian as compared to their counterparts in neighbouring Albanian and Bulgarian, but also in languages such as Swedish. In the same vein, contributions might address the question as to what it means for French to be syntactically ‘the most Germanic’ of Romance languages, as it is sometimes said. Other possible topics include ergative properties of agreement patterns in Southern Italian dialects, and clitic doubling in Spanish as compared to e.g. Greek. On the semantic side, relevant topics in this context are number neutral nouns in Brazilian Portuguese as compared to number neutral nouns in other languages, and the French negative clitic ne as compared to clitic en in diachronic and synchronic varieties of Dutch.