Reviewed by Iván Ortega-Santos, University of Memphis

With an emphasis on Romance languages and the principles and parameters framework, this volume presents a selection of papers from The Romance Turn, a workshop on first and second language acquisition that took place in Madrid in 2004.

Section 1 focuses on ‘Clitics, determiners and pronouns’. Sergio Baauw, Marieke Kuipers, Esther Ruigendijk, and Fernando Cuetos explore the development of se– and self-anaphors in Spanish and Dutch. Anna Gavarró, Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux, and Thomas Roeper contrast the acquisition of the bare nouns and definite nouns in English and Catalan. Isabelle Barrière and Marjorie Perlman Lorch investigate the acquisition of ambiguous valency-marking morphemes in French. The acquisition of object clitics in French and Italian is detailed by Natascha Müller, Katrin Schmitz, Katja Cantone, and Tanja Kupisch, and Maren Pannemann contemplates interference in the first language acquisition of determiner phrases in French-Germanic bilingual children.

In Section 2, ‘Verbs, auxiliaries and inflections’, Claudia Caprin and Maria Teresa Guasti discuss the acquisition the auxiliary be in early Italian. Elisa Franchi looks at patterns of copula omission in Italian. The acquisition of imperatives and the root infinitive hypothesis are discussed by Manola Salustri and Nina Hyams. Finally, the acquisition of subjects and external arguments are explored by Vincent Torrens, Linda Escobar, and Kenneth Wexler for Spanish and by Jacqueline van Kampen for French, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Section 3, ‘Movement and resumptive pronouns’, includes Elaine Grolla’s contribution on the acquisition of A- and A’-bound pronouns in Brazilian Portuguese, María Junkal Gutiérrez Mangado’s exploration of the acquisition of long-distance wh-questions in first language Spanish, and Magda Oiry and Hamida Demirdache’s investigation of the acquisition of wh-in situ in first language French.

The focus of Section 4 is ‘Syntax/discourse interfaces’. João Costa and Kriszta Szendröi discuss focus marking in early European Portuguese, and Manuela Pinto examines the effect of crosslinguistic influence on bilingual first language acquisition.

Finally, Section 5 explores ‘L2 acquisition’. Claudia Borgonovo, Joyce Bruhn de Garavito, and Philippe Prévost discuss English native speakers’ interpretation of determiner phrases signaled by mood in Spanish relative clauses. Cristóbal Lozano investigates the second language acquisition of presentational focus by Greek-speaking learners of Spanish. Silvina A. Montrul and Celeste Rodríguez Louro consider the acquisition of morphosyntactic and discourse-pragmatic aspects of subject expression in second language Spanish across different proficiency levels of English-speaking learners.

The variety of issues addressed will make this volume particularly interesting not only for those specializing in Romance languages or in language acquisition but for a broader audience as well.