Introduction: The Road to Interfaces

Abstract

This book presents contributions to the study of interfaces that have been shaped and inspired in profound ways by María Luisa Zubizarreta’s research program. Since the 1970s, Zubizarreta’s work has pioneered analyses in which the notion of interfaces (or levels of representation) played an essential role. Her research has fundamentally shaped the direction of Romance linguistics and generative grammar over this period. Her first book (Zubizarreta, 1987) explored in some detail issues related to the internal organization of the lexicon and its relationship to syntax. In her third book (Zubizarreta & Oh, 2007), the relationship between a constructional approach to meaning and the lexicon was further investigated by studying how verbal and predicate meaning components, such as manner and motion, articulate in Germanic, Korean, and Romance. In Korean serial verb constructions, manner and motion are encoded in separate morphosyntactic units, whereas in Germanic and Romance the same analysis holds but at a more abstract level of syntactic representation. In another pioneering study on linguistic interfaces, Zubizarreta dissected the complex relationships between word order, prosody, and focus. Zubizarreta (1998) showed, in a rigorous and systematic manner, that certain word-orderrelated movements may be motivated by the prosodic requirements of a language. In this sense, such movements are required to satisfy purely interface conditions. Her innovative analysis opened up a very relevant, rich, and productive area of research over the next decades. Althoughmost of herwork has focused on theoretical and experimental analyses ofmonolingual grammars, Zubizarreta has alsomade significant inroads in the area of L2 grammatical representation (cf. Cabrera & Zubizarreta, 2005a, 2005b; Ionin, Zubizarreta, & Bautista-Maldonado, 2008; Ionin, Zubizarreta, & Philippov, 2009; Nava&Zabizarreta, 2010; Oh&Zubizarreta, 2006; Zubizarreta, 2013; Zubizarreta & Nava, 2011). Bilingual grammars raise important challenges for the conception of grammar in the generative tradition – for example, how to represent lexical information and how tomodel the interaction between grammatical representations at different levels.