Exploring the Syntax-Semantics Interface in the Romance Languages

Dear Colleagues,

The way that syntax and semantics are interconnected at their interface offers a rich and exciting domain for research in current linguistic theory. Within the generative tradition, syntax and semantics constitute distinct components that relate to each other in nontrivial ways. The computational system (syntax) is assumed to derivationally produce an output that is interpretable to the conceptual–intentional system (semantics) in a unidirectional, transparent fashion. In other words, syntactic mechanisms are assumed to provide all of the information necessary for semantic interpretation to proceed.

This basic grammatical architecture has yielded compelling results on such topics as binding (Charnavel 2020), agreement (Arregi and Nevins 2012; Smith 2017), control (Landau 2015; Reed 2020), causation (Hornstein, Martins and Nunes 2008.), exceptives (O’Neill 2011; Authier 2020), focus (Dufter and Jocob 2009), modality (Iatridou and Zeijlstra 2013; Falaus and Laca 2016), negation and negative concord (de Swart and Sag 2002; Giannakidou and Zeijlstra 2017), and VP anaphora (Baltin 2012; van Craenenbroek and Termmerman 2018), to name but a few. Much remains to be discovered, however, with respect to the exact nature of the interface between the two components. There are, for example, no clear answers to questions such as to what extent the particular syntactic computations possible in a language constrain the range of interpretations expressible in it or whether a particular meaning may be expressed by different syntactic derivations in different languages because the semantic component is “opportunistic” in that it will use whatever structures are made available by licit syntactic computations to encode the widest range of meanings. 

The aim of this Special Issue is to further explore this growing area of research by discussing a range of constructions in Romance in which the way syntactic form relates to semantic interpretation plays a crucial role. Contributions are expected to be formulated in terms of current generative theory or in terms of an alternative framework that allows for a clear comparison between the two. Primary empirical support should be drawn from at least one Romance language, although further argumentation based on non-Romance languages is welcome.

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 400–600 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the guest editor Lisa Reed ([email protected]) or to the Languages editorial office ([email protected]). Abstracts will be reviewed by the guest editor for the purpose of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review.

The tentative completion schedule is as follows:

• Abstract submission deadline: 22 July 2021
• Notification of abstract acceptance: 12 August 2021
• Full manuscript deadline: 29 December 2021

References

Arregi, Karlos and Andrew Nevins. 2012. Morphotactics: Basque auxiliaries and the Structure of Spellout. Dordrecht: Springer.

Authier, J.-Marc. 2020. On the comparative analysis of French (ne)…que exceptives. Probus 32: 1-54.

Baltin, Mark. 2012. Deletion versus pro-forms: An overly simple dichotomy? Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 30: 381-423.

Charnavel, Isabelle. 2020 Logophoricity and locality: A view from French anaphors. Linguistic Inquiry 51: 671-723.

de Swart, Henriëtte and Ivan Sag. 2002. Negation and negative concord in Romance. Linguistics & Philosophy 25: 373-417.

Dufter, Audreas and Daniel Jacob (eds.). 2009. Focus and Background in Romance Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Falaus, Anamaria and Brenda Laca. 2016. Modal-temporal interactions. https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01372977.

Giannakidou, Anastasia and Hedde Zeijlstra. 2017. The landscape of negative dependencies: Negative concord and N-words. In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Syntax, ed. by Martin Everaert and Henk van Riemsdijk, 1-38.

Hornstein, Norbert, Ana Maria Martins, and Jairo Nunes. 2008. Perception and causative structures in English and European Portuguese: φ‐feature agreement and the distribution of bare and prepositional infinitives. Syntax 11: 198-222.

Iatridou, Sabine and Hedde Zeijlstra. 2013. Negation, polarity and deontic modals. Linguistic Inquiry 44: 529-568.

Landau, Idan. 2015. A Two-Tiered Theory of Control. Cambridge: MIT Press.

O’Neill, Teresa. 2011. The syntax of ne…que exceptives in French. U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 17.1:175-184.

Reed, Lisa. 2020. On single and two-tiered approaches to control. Languages 5.4: 1-29.

Smith, Peter. 2017. The syntax of semantic agreement in English. Journal of Linguistics 53: 823-863.

van Craenenbroeck, Jeroen and Tanja Temmerman. 2018. The Oxford Handbook of Ellipsis. Oxford: OUP.

Prof. Lisa A. Reed
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Languages is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• syntax
• semantics
• generative grammar
• Romance languages
• scope
• modality
• control