The Romance Inter-Views: Syntax

Grant Armstrong,Andrés Saab,Antonio Fábregas,Luigi Rizzi,Karlos Arregi,Norma Schifano,Caterina Donati,Karen De Clercq

doi:10.5565/rev/isogloss.112

Abstract

The Romance Inter-Views are short, multiple Q&A pairs that address key issues, definitions and ideas regarding Romance linguistics. Prominent exponents of different approaches to the study of Romance linguistics are asked to answer some general questions from their viewpoint. The answers are then assembled so that readers can get a comparative picture of what’s going on in the field.For the first Inter-Views we selected (morpho-)syntactic research, and asked 8 syntacticians, representing four approaches to the study of Romance linguistics, to answer our questions. The approaches we selected are Cartography, Distributed Morphology, Minimalism, and Nanosyntax. The scholars we interviewed are listed hereafter.For Cartography:Luigi Rizzi, professor of Linguistics at the Collège de France;Norma Schifano, lecturer in Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham. For Distributed Morphology:Karlos Arregi, associate professor in Linguistics at the University of Chicago;Andrés Saab, associate researcher at CONICET, Buenos Aires and associate professor in Linguistics at the University of Buenos Aires. For Minimalism:Grant Armstrong, associate professor of Spanish Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison;Caterina Donati, professor of Linguistics at the CNRS Laboratoire de Linguistique formelle, Université de ParisFor Nanosyntax:Karen De Clercq, CNRS researcher at the Laboratoire de Linguistique formelle (Université de Paris).Antonio Fábregas, professor of Linguistics at UIT, The Arctic University of Norway

Highlights

The Romance Inter-Views are short, multiple Q&A pairs that address key issues, definitions and ideas regarding Romance linguistics
Prominent exponents of different approaches to the study of Romance linguistics are asked to answer some general questions from their viewpoint
De Clercq: How can fine-grained empirical work, i.e. the study of syncretisms and morphological and semantic containment, help us uncover the primitive features of Language and their hierarchical structure, the so called Functional Sequence? How can this fine-grained empirical approach uncover regularities in apparent morphological irregularity, and how can insight in lexical structure help to capture parametric variation? Fábregas: What Nanosyntax tries to explain is how primitive units –individual features– are packaged together into constituents that correspond to single exponents

Summary

Introduction

For the first Inter-Views we selected (morpho-)syntactic research, and asked 8 syntacticians, representing four approaches to the study of Romance linguistics, to answer our questions. De Clercq: How can fine-grained empirical work, i.e. the study of syncretisms and morphological and semantic containment, help us uncover the primitive features of Language and their hierarchical structure, the so called Functional Sequence?

Results

Conclusion