Romance languages (Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese) express modality in the verb through mood morphology. Mood morphology is most common in verbs appearing in subordinate clauses. The semantics of the verb of the main clause or the proposition can determine whether the verb of the subordinate clause takes subjunctive or indicative. For learners whose first language does not have subjunctive mood grammaticalized, acquisition of all the meanings and variable uses of subjunctive in Romance languages is a very difficult task. Chapter 6 discusses studies of second language acquisition showing that the meanings and uses of subjunctive are acquirable with very advanced proficiency. The second part presents instructed intervention studies of the subjunctive in Spanish and other languages that have targeted beginner and intermediate English-speaking learners. The vast majority of the intervention studies on the subjunctive have been conducted to test the effectiveness of the Input Processing approach to language teaching.

This chapter tackles two principal problems with connecting the formulas to a real world: their often difficult or incorrect (by classical standards) Latin, and the late Roman and early Merovingian legal language that has led to them being labeled as antiquarian fossils. The chapter argues that the idiosyncratic Latin of the formulas in fact communicated essential content in regions where the spoken languages were evolving into Romance, as well as (with the help of glosses and occasional vernacular words) where they were Germanic. The obsolete (or obsolescent) legal language reflects a legal culture in the eighth and ninth centuries in which – especially in western areas with strong Roman roots – references to Roman law and procedure still meant something. Roman legal language gave some documents an imprimatur of authority. Descriptions of antique procedures bore a recognizable relationship (though not necessarily an exact correspondence) to how those transactions were actually carried out. In short, the legal and formulaic inheritance of Rome in the western regions of the Carolingian world contributed to a normative framework that lent authority and legitimacy both to documents and to the legal procedures that they recorded.

Phonology/phonetics and morphology interact in such a way as to render difficult any clear-cut dividing line between these subfields. Romanists have long observed that phonetics play a crucial role in language change. From this point of view there is nothing exceptional in the fact that phonetics/phonology may provide the system with the very substance of morphological oppositions. The number and the extension of the morphological processes amenable to phonetic principles in the Romance domain are so wide that only a few typical phenomena are treated in this chapter. Furthermore, it is not always evident how one can establish the extent to which a given morphological alternation is phonologically driven, whether we are dealing with a purely phonological phenomenon or whether we should recognize some lexical conditioning in the choice of the allomorphs. The examples discussed (allomorphy in the definite article, subject clitics and affixes, possessives, and the nominal, verbal, and adjectival stems) show that the phonetic impulse for a morphological alternation may no longer be transparent ; in other cases, the trigger of a given pattern is no longer available or can only be identified following a process of diachronic reconstruction.

The evolution of the Romance languages from Latin was significantly shaped by the numerous language contact environments, which resulted from conquest, colonization, and trade. This chapter traces the development of the largest Romance languages throughout Europe, with emphasis on the known or postulated effects of language contact. The chapter continues with an account of the spread of Spanish, Portuguese, and French to the Americas, together with the ensuing contacts with indigenous languages and languages of voluntary and involuntary immigration and the formation of Afro-Romance creole languages.

We present a selective review of studies on Romance languages wherein acceptability experiments played an important role in advancing our knowledge of the grammars of particular linguistic varieties and, by extension, furthering our knowledge of human language and linguistic theory. First, we examine recent studies on word order in wh-questions across varieties of Spanish. Next, we examine the value of acceptability experiments in the study of infrequent structures (e.g. clitic left-dislocation, focus fronting). We highlight the importance of data triangulation by examining studies of information focus in Spanish, emphasizing the impact that methodological choices can have on results. We also examine control and raising structures in Brazilian Portuguese, where conflicting results have required innovative methodological approaches. Since acceptability intuitions may be uniquely nuanced for minority languages, we also briefly discuss how data that is typically used in other theoretical paradigms can contribute to data triangulation with lesser-spoken Romance varieties.

This chapter covers languages spoken in Europe, focusing primarily on the Indo-European languages. The internal classification of the Indo-European family is provided and the branches of the family that are represented in Europe are covered in detail. The discovery of the Indo-European family in the late 1700s and the continuing controversy surrounding the “homeland” of the Indo-European languages are discussed. A separate section is dedicated to non-Indo-European languages of Europe, with special focus on Basque, an isolate language. The final section delves into endangered languages of Europe.