2025 collection (published to date)

The study of Romance linguistics has long been a vibrant and dynamic field, enriched by diverse theoretical perspectives and a range of methodological innovations. This volume gathers contributions from leading scholars and emerging voices in the field to provide an up-to-date and comprehensive state-of-the-art survey of key issues in contemporary Romance linguistics. It offers a rich cross-section of the field’s current landscape, with a particular focus on Spanish and French, and explores how recent advancements in linguistic theory and methodology intersect with real-world language use in diverse social and cultural contexts.

At the heart of this volume is a tribute to the distinguished careers of Barbara E. Bullock and Almeida Jacqueline Toribio, two scholars whose work has had a profound impact on the interdisciplinary study of Romance languages. Their groundbreaking research has not only shaped our understanding of key issues in syntax, phonology, and sociolinguistics, but also set the stage for future innovations in the discipline. This collection brings together the legacy of their scholarship, honoring their contributions while simultaneously advancing the field they have so profoundly influenced.

This book weaves together constructions, imperatives, dialogicity, and discourse units. How can that be? This is precisely the question it sets out to answer by working at the crossroads of Construction Grammar (CxG), Corpus Linguistics (CL), and Interactional Linguistics (IL). Profiting from this cross-fertilising synergy, the book singles out BELIEVE (YOU) ME, BELIEVE IT OR NOT, THINK AGAIN and MIND YOU as its objects of study, offers an empirical analysis of their properties and situates them within an entrenched and far-reaching, yet conveniently ‘camouflaged’, network of dialogic perspectivisation. In so doing, the book provides novel insights into the mental state verbal fillers of the constructions alongside their imperative-induced non-compositionality and dialogicity which motivate their function as discourse unit framing agents and, per extension, discourse operators. The book thus makes a case for CxG’s ability to go beyond its word-, or phrase-based ‘comfort zone’ and address phenomena at a micro-, meso- and macro-discourse level with across-the-board benefits.

Language isolates provide unique insights into human history and linguistic diversity. Nevertheless, isolates have been studied less exhaustively than non-isolates. The eleven papers gathered in this volume provide new methodological tools in order to better understand isolates, including a detailed, in-depth, up-to-date discussion of what it means to be a language isolate and the criteria by which languages should be classified as isolate. The book also provides a series of techniques, some refined on the basis of former literature, and others new, in order to recover the histories of language isolates. In addition, the papers in this volume advance our knowledge about each of the individual languages studied here, which are, for the most part, endangered and under-documented. This book will appeal to a broad audience spanning typologists, historical linguists, descriptive linguists, and teachers of linguistics.