This compilation of articles on different areas in Hispanic linguistics is the outcome of the Hispanic linguistics symposium held at the University of Western Ontario in October of 2006. The articles included in this volume are compatible with the most current conceptual models (e.g., Minimalism in the case of syntax or optimality theory in the case of phonology); many of these studies also engage in ongoing debates that have occupied the research agenda of the field of SLA for the last two decades (e.g., the issue of parameter resetting, the role of explicit instruction, or the full transfer/full access hypothesis), thus providing new insight into old problems. The volume is organized into five thematic sections (acquisition, phonology, syntax, language variation, and pragmatics). However, half of the articles included focus on SLA; therefore, this area receives the most coverage in the volume and will be the focus of this review.
The articles in the first section focus on the SLA of various linguistic domains, such as syntax (Androutsopolou, Español-Echevarría, & Prévost; Bowles & Montrul; Iverman & Rothman; Montrul, Foote, & Perpiñán; Perpiñán), semantics (Chin), the syntax-semantics interface (Borgonovo, Bruhn de Garavito, & Prévost; Iverson & Rothman), or phonology (de Prada Pérez). A unifying topic in all of these articles is first language transfer; the effect of English as a dominant language in contact with Spanish is also the focus of two studies that compare early and late bilingualism (Montrul, Foote, & Perpiñan; Perpiñán). Another prevailing topic is variability in learner language.
The study by Androutsopolou, Español-Echevarría, and Prévost addresses the issue of knowledge of adjectival ordering restrictions by focusing on prenominal placement of evaluative adjectives in Spanish. Their results are compatible with previous accounts of variability in learner language such as that of Sorace (Reference Sorace, Cornips and Corrigan2005) and Herschensohn (Reference Herschensohn2000), who proposed that specification of interpretable features takes place in an item-by-item fashion in interlanguage grammars. Worth mentioning is the study by Geeslin and Gudmestad, which focuses on variation across tasks among second language learners and contributes to the body of research that examines sociolinguistically variable grammatical features by shifting the focus from an assessment of accuracy toward an analysis of the predictors of use of a given variant.
Three interesting articles in the first section study child language acquisition. Fernández Fuertes et al. investigate the development of verbal morphology in bilingual children, and Pratt and Grinstead explore the apparent optionality of tense marking in the Spanish of monolingual children. Almgren, Beloki, and Materola compare the development of narrative skills in the Spanish storytelling of two different groups of children in two different Basque-Spanish bilingual contexts.
Overall, however, this volume does not seem to represent theoretical and methodological diversity. Most of the articles on SLA are written from a generative perspective and analyze data gathered through grammaticality-judgment tests or interpretations tasks. Although all of the articles in the book are empirical in nature, only a handful of the studies analyze production or corpus data.
This book includes works by well-renowned authors (such as Bruhn de Garavito, Montrul, Prévost, Saltarelli, Androutsopolou, Español-Echevarría, Borgonovo, Liceras, and Geeslin) as well as by young researchers. As in any collection of proceedings, the articles vary in terms of quality. Most, although short, are fully developed studies in their own right (from carefully thought-out research questions to well-planned methodology and results); however, a couple of studies present several limitations, such as an insufficient number of participants or insignificant results that arise from self-reported data. Although some aspects could have been developed further in each article, this is often the case with proceedings publications due to the space limitations of this type of volume. As many of the articles only present preliminary or partial results, this book provides the reader with a well-rounded overview of prevailing scholarship in the field of Hispanic linguistics but also encourages further-developed or follow-up studies in the near future.
