Proceedings of the VIII Nereus International Workshop : “Referential Properties of the Romance DP in the Context of Multilingualism”

Abstract

This volume offers selected papers presented at the international workshop "Referential properties of the Romance DP in the context of multilingualism" held at the University of Cambridge in December 2016. This workshop was part of the series organised by NEREUS (Research Network for Referential Categories in Spanish and other Romance languages) biannually since 2002.The papers in this volume deal with Romance DPs in the context of the sentence and discourse with a strong focus on Differential Object Marking (DOM) (Pomino, Schmitz & Neuburger, von Heusinger, Kaiser & Arriortua, Parodi & Avram, Cyrino & Ordóñez) as well as on clitic doubling (Fischer, Navarro & Vega Vilanova) and binding in ditransitive constructions (Cornilescu & Tigău). Together these contributions shed light on syntactic, semantic and discourse properties that anchor DPs in their context, such as case, movement, animacy, specificity, referential stability, among many others.The multilingualism component is addressed in language contact situations, as in the Basque-Spanish case and in Spanish-Catalan as well as Spanish varieties, diachronically and synchronically. Language contact together with developmental issues are key components in bilingualism, which can be observed at two different developmental stages. On the one hand, simultaneous or sequential bilingualism in early childhood and, on the other, the outcome and route of the developmental process as observed in heritage speakers (HS), i.e. older speakers, who speak a minority language within a community with a different language. Language acquisition under different conditions, including second language acquisition by children and adults in classroom settings, completes the developmental picture. An additional essential component of the study of multilingualism both in language acquisition and in language contact is the observation of a range of language pairings: Spanish in combination with Basque, Catalan, German, Brazilian Portuguese, English, Turkish, Romanian in combination with Hungarian, Persian and English, Persian in combination with Balochi and with Romanian. The variety of language pairings makes it possible to distinguish the syntactic, semantic and discourse properties of DPs from language-specific and cross-linguistic effects.