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Revisiting diachronic change in the nominal domain from Latin to modern Romance

ORCiD logo with link | University of Göttingen
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

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Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with University of Göttingen.

Published online: 22 April 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.24056.blu
Abstract
The intuition behind this offering is classical and familiar (cf. Schwegler, A. (1990). Analyticity and syntheticity. A diachronic perspective with special reference to Romance languages. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar): morphological richness of nominal inflection underlies the possibility of Left Branch Extraction in Latin (traditionally called hyperbaton) while the loss of morphological richness of nominal inflection yielded the Left Branch Condition that characterizes modern Romance. Specifically, analogous to the notion “strong” and “weak T” in (2015). Problems of Projection: Extensions. In E. D. Domenico, C. Hamann, and S. Matteini (Eds.), Structures, strategies and beyond — studies in honour of Adriana Belletti, pp. 3–16. John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, I here adopt the Nominal Strength Parameter (Blümel, A. (2024). Labeling Theory and the Nominal Phrase. In J. Lu, E. Petersen, A. Zaitsu, and B. Harizanov (Eds.), Proceedings of WCCFL 40.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), a new instantiation of the classical Borer-Chomsky conjecture which localizes syntactic variation in properties of functional heads. It states that the functional nominalizing head n (cf. Borer, H. (2005). In Name Only. Structuring Sense, Volume I. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) comes in two kinds for the purposes of identification of a category label — strong and weak. These two lexical values morphologically correlate with rich (gender, number and case) noun inflection on the one hand, and poor noun inflection on the other. Crucially, the analysis unifies the mentioned syntactic properties pertaining to the distribution of determiner categories with their optionality in Latin and their obligatoriness in modern Romance (cf. e.g. Longobardi, G. (1994). Reference and proper names. Linguistic Inquiry 251, 609–66.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar on Italian). This paper makes the novel proposal that the relevant diachronic change in the nominal domain involved a resetting of the value of n from strong to weak.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Setting the empirical stage
  • 3.Theoretical background: Labeling theory
  • 4.Proposal: Nominal strength and weakness
    • 4.1Executing the analysis and initial predictions
    • 4.2Further predictions and refinements of the analysis
    • 4.3A Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (90)
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