Microvariation in the Languages of the Iberian Peninsula

Abstract

This issue of the Catalan Journal of Linguistics was conceived with the idea to promote comparative studies of the languages spoken in the Iberian Peninsula. The importance of comparison in linguistics dates back to neogrammarians in the xix century due to their interest of discovering the common roots of most of the languages spoken in Europe. In order to get to that objective, comparison of phonological patterns were crucial to retrieve the common Indo-European origins. In the generative framework variation and comparison was not highlighted until the advent of Lectures on Government and Binding (Chomsky 1981), which marks the beginning of the Principles and Parameter theory. A parameter, in its original conception, is a principle with a dimension of variability with respect to a specific syntactic property (Head-initial or Head-final, Node for Subjaceny: S or S’). This variation can be expressed with the values + or –, and each value is associated to a series of syntactic correlations. This framework tried to capture in a formal and elegant way what Greenberg (1963) had already noticed in the 60s: variation among languages is not random and unpredictable, but languages have very specific patterns of variation. One finds correlations and clusters of properties that go together. The idea of parameter gave shape to this intuition by connecting a specific property of the language to a cluster of effects. Thus, in the first formulation of pro-drop (Rizzi 1982), strong person morphology in a language derived a series of properties (null subject, subject inversion, lack of that-trace effect). More than 30 years have passed and the theory has moved on since then; however, the idea of finding correlations among languages is still intriguing and crucial for understanding our language faculty. Kayne (2000, 2005, 2010) has taken this line of approach very seriously. He has shown that theoretical advances must be made through comparative tools. He started this line of approach in his classic comparative studies between English-French, then moved French-Italian and finally further