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Article published In: Diachronica
Vol. 33:4 (2016) ► pp.461–502

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A comparative perspective on the evolution of Romance clausal structure

Published online: 31 December 2016
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https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.33.4.02wol
This article presents a comparative analysis of the diachronic evolution of Romance clausal structure from Classical Latin through to the late medieval period, with particular reference to the Verb Second (V2) property. In the medieval period three distinct diachronic stages can be identified as regards V2: a C-VSO stage attested in Old Sardinian, a ‘relaxed’ V2 stage across Early Medieval Romance and maintained into 13th and 14th century Occitan and Sicilian, and a ‘strict’ V2 stage attested in 13th and 14th century French, Spanish and Venetian. The C-VSO grammar found in Old Sardinian is a retention of the syntactic system attested in late Latin textual records, itself an innovation on an ‘incipient V2’ stage found in Classical Latin, where V-to-C movement and XP-fronting receive a pragmatically or syntactically marked interpretation.
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2025. Old Spanish and the Split V2 hypothesis. Journal of Linguistics ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Olivier, Marc, Christina Sevdali & Raffaella Folli
2023. Clitic climbing and restructuring in the history of French. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 8:1 DOI logo
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2022. Interface phenomena and language change. In Language Change at the Interfaces [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 275], ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
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2020. Clitic position in Old Occitan affirmative verb-first declaratives coordinated bye. Journal of Historical Linguistics 10:3 ► pp. 389 ff. DOI logo
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2021. Clause Structure and Illocutionary Force in Medieval Gallo-Romance: Clitic Position in Old Occitan and Early Old French Sentential Coordination. Probus 33:1 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
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Eska, Joseph F.
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Pujol i Campeny, Afra
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Wolfe, Sam
2018. Occitan, verb second and the Medieval Romance word order debate. In Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 13 [Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory, 13], ► pp. 315 ff. DOI logo
Wolfe, Sam
2018. Probing the Syntax of a Problematic Particle: Old French ‘si’ Revisited. Transactions of the Philological Society 116:3 ► pp. 332 ff. DOI logo
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2020. Old French si, grammaticalisation, and the interconnectedness of change. In Historical Linguistics 2017 [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 350], ► pp. 253 ff. DOI logo
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2022. Microvariation and Change in the Romance Left Periphery. Probus 34:1 ► pp. 235 ff. DOI logo

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