Generative grammar addressed for the first time acquisition as a central issue in the study of grammar. This perspective has given rise over the years to a considerable body of work, mainly on first language acquisition, but also on second language acquistion, bilingual acquisition, and the acquisition by children affected by SLI. If we assume continuity, i.e. that all stages in acquisition reflect possible natural languages, we must posit a mutual dependency between grammatical theory and the facts of acquisition. On the one hand, theories about particular languages should pass the proof against data from acquisition. On the other hand, acquisition data may provide a source of evidence for deciding among alternative theories of language.
Within the past twenty years, Romance languages have been an increasing focus of research for theories of language, and the literature on the acquisition of Romance has grown steadily during this time. The moment thus seemed ripe to unify the efforts of several scholars working on the acquisition of Romance languages and devote a special issue of CatJL to the acquisition of Romance, taking into consideration the double perspective just mentioned. We thank the authors and reviewers for making this project possible. The volume deals with the acquisition of the phonology, morphology and syntax in Catalan, French, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish. The papers dealing with phonology focus on two main topics: the acquisition of prosodic constituents and the interface between phonology and morphology. The prosodic constituents examined are: the syllable (Demuth & Kehoe on consonant clusters in French; Prieto & Bosch Baliarda on codas in Catalan) and the foot (Goad & Buckley on the relevance of the foot in Québec French). The morpho-phonological interface is treated by Fikkert & Freitas (on the relevance of allophony and allomorphy for the acquisition of the Portuguese vowel system), and Lleó (on the dependence of plural marking on phonological acquisition). The papers dealing with syntax focus on the acquisition of pronominal clitics (Babyonyshev & Marin on clitic production in Romanian and Pirvulescu on clitic omission in French) and verb and wh- movement (Costa & Loureiro on verb raising in Portuguese, Hamann on wh- movement in French).
All the papers in this volume show the relevance of formal linguistics to issues in acquisition, focusing on the relationship between representation and acquisition from different perspectives and in different modules of the grammar.

Articles

Exclamatives: A Thematic Guide with Many Questions and Few Answers
Xavier Villalba
9-40
Deconstructing Exclamations
Elena Castroviejo Miró
41-90
Exclamative Wh-Phrases as Positive Polarity Items
Raquel González Rodríguez
91-116
Spanish Root Exclamatives at the Syntax/Semantics Interface
Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach
117-133
Catalan “Déu n’hi do” and Conventional Implicatures in Exclamatives
Laia Mayol
135-156
Pleonastic tet in the Lapscheure dialect
Liliane Haegeman, Danièle Van de Velde
157-199

This volume offers a collection of brief and orginal articles that aim at developing the minimalist approach to language. In this introduction, we would like to discuss certain issues concerning the Minimalist Program and the concept of Universal Grammar as well as to present the contributions of the volume.
The term minimalism is typically associated to certain artistic tendencies whose work is said to be stripped down to its most fundamental features. In the linguistic agenda developed by Noam Chomsky and others since the early nineties, this term is endowed with the same aesthetic concern of searching for the most fundamental features of grammatical theory, but it crucially adds a substantive commitment to investigate to what extent language is—in a sense we clarify below—a perfect system.
In Martin & Uriagereka (2000) this bifurcated path to pursue the Minimalist Program (MP) is emphasized by establishing a distinction between methodological minimalism and substantive minimalism. The methodological facet is concerned with the “theory of language” under construction, whereas the substantive facet is concerned with how well designed “language itself” is. Methodological minimalism seeks those components of a linguistic theory that are redundant, stipulative, and idiosyncratic, in order to eliminate or reformulate them in the form of parsimonius, well-grounded, and general principles. Substantive minimalism explores whether an alleged property of language is a genuine property or an apparent property, and if genuine, whether it satisfies the Strongest Minimalist Thesis—SMT (see Chomsky 2000)—, i.e., whether it is an optimal solution to the requirements imposed by the external systems.

Index. Particles and prepositions

7   Bosque, Ignacio. On disjunctive dependencies.
23 Dikken, Marcel den. Directions from the GET-GO. On the syntax of manner-of-motion verbs in directional constructions.
55 Fábregas, Antonio. On Spanish Prepositional Prefixes and the Cartography of Prepositions.
79 Gallego, Ángel J. On the prepositional nature of non-finite verbs.
103 Pavón Lucero, María Victoria. Why Are There No Locative Conjunctions in Spanish?
125 Real Puigdollers, Cristina. A microparametric approach on goal of motion constructions: properties of adpositional systems in Romance and Germanic.
151 Rigau, Gemma; Suïls, Jordi. Microvariation in Catalan and Occitan complementizers: the so-called expletive se.
167 Terzi,Arhonto. On null spatial PS and their arguments.
189 Resums