Romance linguistics

After a brief summary of the historic setting that determined the appearance of Romance languages as a result of the evolution of Latin, and an overview of the main typological characteristics of this language family, we will make a close comparative analysis, among some Romance languages, of a set of constructions and phenomena that are particularly interesting from the point of view of this language family, such as negation, auxiliary selection, questions, discourse markers, and word order (via the analysis of constructions such as dislocations, clefts, or subject inversion).

On successful completion of this course, students should be able to: 

• recognize typical traits of the Romance-language family, as well as the main traits of specific Romance languages;
• describe and compare Romance languages with respect to the phenomena seen in class, focusing in particular on their interpretation and (if the case) their pragmatic function;
• present a personal research work to the class, answer potential questions from the audience.

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