Probus

International Journal of Romance Linguistics

Editor-in-Chief: W. Leo Wetzels

Language: English

First published: January 1, 1989

Publication Frequency: 2 issues per year

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Starting 2025, Probus will be transferred to Gold Open Access on a year-by-year basis. All articles will thus immediately appear under the Creative Commons license CC-BY. There will be no publication costs for the authors. The Open Access transformation is based on Subscribe-to-Open, an alternative model that enables the full Open Access transformation of journals through the continuation of existing subscriptions. The prerequisite for successful transformation is that subscriptions are continued to the same extent as before. The editors of Probus and the publisher De Gruyter would therefore like to thank all subscribers for their support, which has made the transformation to Open Access possible.　

Objective
Probus is a platform for the discussion of diachronic and synchronic research in the field of Romance linguistics, with special emphasis on phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and language acquisition. The journal aims to keep its readers abreast of the developments in Romance linguistics by encouraging problem-oriented contributions that combine a solid empirical basis with the insights provided by modern theoretical approaches. Studies in applied disciplines in any of the sub-areas mentioned above are welcome provided they contribute to a better understanding of the global architecture of the grammar or the concepts and principles that play a role therein.

Probus is a double-blind peer-reviewed journal of international scope.

Topics

phonology
morphology
syntax
semantics
pragmatics
language acquisition

Article formats
Research articles

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Your Benefits

Your benefits:

State-of-the-art forum for research reports where the techniques of modern theoretical linguistics are applied to the resolution of problems in Romance linguistics
Useful medium for the exchange of ideas, explanations, and solutions aiming at a better understanding of the structure of Romance languages
Novel platform for the discussion of data from Romance linguistics
Rigorous peer-review

Open Access
Linking French wh-in-situ and context: a choice function analysis

September 12, 2025

Aliza Glasbergen-Plas, Jenny Doetjes, Lisa L.-S. Cheng

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French wh -in-situ questions may be infelicitous when a quantifier or focus expression precedes the in-situ wh -phrase (‘intervention effects’). However, these intervention effects are absent in a certain type of context. This paper offers an account of French wh -in-situ questions that explains the role of context. We propose that French wh -phrases can be interpreted in-situ by means of a contextually bound choice function. We further hypothesise that, due to an ongoing process of language change, there are two groups of French speakers. Both groups can interpret wh -in-situ via the choice function but one group may additionally use covert movement. We show how the choice function account along with this ‘Two speaker groups hypothesis’ accounts for the effect of context on intervention effects, as well as several other longstanding debates regarding the semantics and prosody of French wh -in-situ questions.
Open Access
Weak crossover in Spanish relative clauses

September 12, 2025

Rodrigo Ranero, Gregory Scontras, Maria Polinsky

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We investigate the status of weak crossover violations (WCO) in Spanish restrictive relative clauses. Claims in the literature lead to the expectation that Spanish does not show sensitivity to WCO in this context; however, ours is the first systematic investigation of the phenomenon in the language. We find that Spanish restrictive relative clauses do exhibit WCO violations: when the relative clause is headed by que , participants rate crossover configurations lower than configurations without crossover; when the relative clause is introduced by a quien , the status of WCO violations is less clear. We consider two explanations for our results in a quien clauses: potential structural differences between que and a quien , and the possibility for an appositive parse for some of our a quien configurations. Our results set the stage for further cross-linguistic investigations of crossover phenomena.
Open Access
Romanian plăcea ‘like’: an alternating Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat verb

July 14, 2025

Mihaela Ilioaia, Marleen Van Peteghem, Jóhanna Barðdal

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In several Indo-European languages, including Romanian, predicates such as plăcea ‘like’ from Latin placēre ‘like, please’, are found selecting for a dative experiencer and a nominative stimulus, which appear to allow for two opposite, but equally neutral, word orders, i.e. dative-before-nominative and nominative-before-dative. This stands in stark contrast with topicalized datives, which are always focal in Romanian. We hypothesize that the two word orders with plăcea represent two diametrically-opposed argument structures, Dat-Nom and Nom-Dat, thus predicting that the dative behaves syntactically as a subject in Dat-Nom structures and the nominative as a subject in Nom-Dat structures. An inspection of seven subject tests, recently applied in the literature on Romanian, reveals that two of these do not distinguish between subjects and objects, while the remaining five confirm that either argument of plăcea , the dative or the nominative, passes the subject tests, with the other argument, the nominative or the dative, behaving as an object.

Journal Impact Factor	0.4	2024, Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate, 2025)
5-year Journal Impact Factor	0.7	2024, Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate, 2025)
Journal Citation Indicator	0.41	2024, Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate, 2025)
CiteScore	1.0	2024, Scopus (Elsevier B.V., 2025)
SCImago Journal Rank	0.273	2024, SJR (Scimago Lab, 2025; Data Source: Scopus)
Source Normalized Impact per Paper	1.002	2024, CWTS Journal Indicators (CWTS B.V., 2025; Data Source: Scopus)

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