Introduction

There is general recognition among Romanists of all theoretical persuasions (see Harris 1978:5f.; Bauer 1995:5; La Fauci 1997:11f. Zamboni 1998:128) that, in the passage from Latin to Romance, the morphosyntax of the emerging languages underwent significant changes in three fundamental areas of the grammar involving: (i) the nominal group; (ii) the verbal group; and (iii) the sentence. At a superficial level, the impact of such changes is most readily observable in: (i) the gradual reduction (e.g., medieval Gallo-Romance, Romanian) and/or eventual loss (e.g., Ibero-Romance, central-southern Italo-Romance) of the Latin morphological case system (see §6.2.2, and Sornicola, this volume, chapter 1: §3.1); (ii) the profusion of auxiliary verb structures (see §3.3.2) to mark such categories as tense (e.g., present perfectivity: Occ. ai dormit ‘I have slept’), aspect (e.g., continuous aspect: Srd. so kredende lit. ‘I am believing’), mood (e.g., epistemic modality: Cat. La pipa deu valer molt ‘the pipe must be worth a lot’) and voice (e.g., passive: Ro. sînt invitaţi la un cocteil ‘they are invited to a cocktail party’); and (iii) the gradual shift from an original unmarked (S)OV word order (e.g., Lat. paulus librum scripsit ‘Paul wrote a book’) towards a fixed (S)VO (/V(S)O) order (e.g., Sp. (Pablo) escribió (Pablo) un libro; see §3.2.2, and Salvi, this volume, chapter 7: §3.4.7).