From Latin to Romance Morphosyntactic Typology and Change

by Ledgeway, Adam

• ISBN13: 9780199584376
• ISBN10: 0199584370
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-07-26
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This book examines the grammatical changes that took place in the transition from Latin to the Romance languages. The emerging language underwent changes in three fundamental areas involving the noun phrase, verb phrase, and the sentence. The impact of the changes can be seen in the reduction of the Latin case system; the appearance of auxiliary verb structures to mark such categories tense, mood, and voice; and a shift towards greater rigidification of word order. The authorconsiders how far these changes are interrelated and compares their various manifestations and pace of change across the different standard and non-standard varieties of Romance. He describes the historical background to the emergence of the Romance varieties and their Latin ancestry, considering in detailthe richly documented diachronic variation exhibited by the Romance family. Adam Ledgeway reviews the accounts and explanations that have been proposed within competing theoretical frameworks, and considers how far traditional ideas should be reinterpreted in light of recent theoretical developments. His wide-ranging account shows that the transition from Latin to Romance is not only of great intrinsic interest, but both provides a means of challenging linguistic orthodoxies and presents opportunities to shape new perspectives on language change, structure, andvariation. His fascinating book will appeal equally to Romance linguists, Latinists, philologists, historical linguists, and syntacticians of all theoretical persuasions.

Author Biography

Adam Ledgeway is University Senior Lecturer in Romance Philology in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages of the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge. His publications include A Comparative Syntax of the Dialects of Southern Italy (Wiley-Blackwell, 2000); Sui dialetti italoromanzi. Saggi in onore di Nigel B. Vincent (Biddles 2007, co-edited with D.Bentley); Grammatica diacronica del napoletano (Niemeyer 2009); Syntactic Variation: The Dialects of Italy (CUP 2010, co-edited with R.D'Alessandro and I.Roberts); In and Out of Italy: Lingua e cultura della migrazione italiana (Guerra 2010, co-edited with A.L.Lepschy); The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages (CUP 2011, co-edited with M. Maiden and J.C. Smith).

Table of Contents

Series preface	p. ix
List of tables	p. xi
List of abbreviations	p. xiii
From Latin to Romance: introduction	p. 1
From Latin to Romance: the historical background	p. 1
Research questions	p. 2
Aims and objectives	p. 4
Acknowledgements	p. 8
Syntheticity and analyticity	p. 10
Traditional approach	p. 10
Problems	p. 12
Languages or constructions?	p. 12
Absolute vs relative interpretations	p. 16
Causal relations between analyticity and morphophonological erosion	p. 21
Gradual change and competition	p. 23
Explanatory power	p. 24
Grammaticalization	p. 28
Configurationality and the rise of constituent structure	p. 30
Introduction	p. 30
Nominal and verbal groups	p. 31
Latin	p. 35
Discontinuous structures	p. 43
Conclusion	p. 45
Romance	p. 47
Adjectival positions	p. 50
Restricted adjectival positions	p. 55
Complements and adjuncts	p. 57
The sentence	p. 59
Classical Latin	p. 59
Discontinuous structures	p. 61
Late Latin and Romance	p. 64
Conngurationality: concluding remarks	p. 71
Degrees of configurationality	p. 77
Conngurationality and the rise of functional structure	p. 81
Introduction	p. 81
Determiner phrase (DP)	p. 82
Indefinite article	p. 82
Definite article	p. 89
Late Latin	p. 89
Romance	p. 96
Ipse articles	p. 100
Neuter articles	p. 105
Conclusion	p. 107
Other determiners	p. 110
Romanian	p. 113
Demonstrative article	p. 113
Possessive article	p. 115
Inflectional phrase (IP)	p. 119
Romance auxiliaries	p. 119
Semantic weakening	p. 121
Morphosyntactic properties	p. 124
Morphophonological specialization	p. 127
Romance perfective auxiliary constructions	p. 130
Romance synthetic future(-in-the-past)	p. 134
Romance verb positions	p. 140
Summary and conclusions	p. 146
Complementizer phrase (CP)	p. 150
Evidence for Latin CP structure	p. 150
Archaic non-configurational pattern	p. 156
Evidence for Romance CP structure	p. 158
Topic and Focus Fields	p. 159
Internal structure of Topic and Focus fields	p. 162
Focus field	p. 162
Topic field	p. 166
Force and Finiteness	p. 169
Other projections	p. 176
Conclusion	p. 179
From Latin to Romance: a configurational approach	p. 181
Introduction	p. 181
Early evidence for functional structure	p. 183
Early evidence for configurationality	p. 185
Head parameter: traditional observations	p. 196
Some Romance counterexamples?	p. 198
Changing directions: Latin	p. 202
Early head-initial structures	p. 204
Complementizers and adpositions	p. 205
Comparatives	p. 207
Relatives	p. 209
Noun phrase	p. 210
Adjectives	p. 210
Genitives	p. 213
Concluding remarks	p. 218
Other categories	p. 219
Summary	p. 224
Verbal group	p. 225
Auxiliary and dependent infinitive	p. 234
Conclusion	p. 235
Changing directions: from Latin to Romance	p. 235
Head-last → head-first: roll-up	p. 236
Rise of head-initiality	p. 238
Position of complement clauses	p. 242
Position of nominal complements	p. 249
Other patterns of harmonization	p. 252
Clausal word order	p. 255
Pragmatic variation: left-edge fronting	p. 258
Identifying the left-edge: cola and left peripheries	p. 259
Modifier fronting	p. 262
Reanalysis: roll-up → edge-fronting	p. 269
Nominal fronting	p. 270
From Latin to Romance	p. 277
Conclusion	p. 281
Head-marking and dependent-marking	p. 284
Introduction	p. 284
Variation in marking	p. 286
Romance functional categories → Romance head-marking	p. 289
Head-marking on D	p. 290
Head-marking on Infl	p. 292
Head-marking on C	p. 298
Extreme head-marking: the case of Ripano	p. 299
Verbal domain	p. 300
Subject-verb agreement	p. 300
Subject-/object-verb agreement	p. 302
Object-verb agreement	p. 305
Contagious head-marking	p. 308
Conclusion	p. 310
The rise and fall of alignments	p. 312
Introduction	p. 312
Classical Latin	p. 314
Late Latin and conservative Romance: active/stative syntax	p. 316
. Verbal group	p. 317
Perfective auxiliary constructions	p. 317
Latin background	p. 317
Romance	p. 319
Participle agreement	p. 326
Nominal group	p. 328
Extended and generalized accusative	p. 328
Early Romance binary case systems	p. 333
Sentence: word order	p. 335
Other patterns	p. 336
Innovative Romance: nominative/accusative syntax	p. 340
Verbal group	p. 341
Perfective auxiliary constructions	p. 341
Participle agreement	p. 347
Sentence: word order	p. 349
Concluding remarks	p. 351
References	p. 353
Index	p. 409
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