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This chapter offers a brief overview of how Martin Maiden’s theoretical interests and empirical foci have developed over the course of his career, starting with his early work on metaphony and moving through to his central engagement with the concept of the morphome. We consider the way his explorations of the structure and history of Romance inflexional systems provide essential diachronic confirmation of the need to recognize such a concept and of the way it relates not only to individual items but to the overall organization of the paradigm. We move on from there to consider the place of the morphome and morphome-based thinking within recent developments in morphological theory and in particular the way different approaches define—and in some cases erase!—the boundary between morphology and syntax. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of the individual chapters contained in this volume and the light they shed on the relations between periphrasis and inflexion both with respect to Romance and in broader theoretical terms.

This chapter examines the place of Hopper’s classic concepts of layering and divergence within grammaticalization, concentrating on form rather than content. It explores the development of grammaticalized verbs in a number of Romance languages, beginning with a detailed study of the variant forms deriving from Latin HABERE ‘have’, and demonstrates how their distribution at different historical stages reflects the morphomic structure of the paradigm but does not exhibit any systematic correlation between changes in form and function. The chapter then moves on to patterns of suppletion with GO verbs, with particular reference to Catalan and the formal alternations displayed there between lexical and grammatical uses. Returning to reflexes of HABERE, we examine an alternative diachronic sequence in some northern Italian dialects, in which rather than auxiliary uses being reduced it is forms of the main verb which are reinforced by the incorporation of a clitic. Finally, we consider developments in some southern Italian dialects where the grammaticalized verbs—in this case GO and STAND—rather than being the exponents of grammatical categories such as person and number, as is usual for auxiliaries, lose their inflexions and come to serve as temporal/aspectual prefixes. The chapter concludes by underscoring the potential independence of changes in form and function and the role of the morphome as a factor in stabilizing such formal patterns as may have developed.

This chapter explores from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives the categorial status of words like English of and equivalent items in other languages. It evaluates, and ultimately comes down in favour of, the arguments for continuing to treat such items as prepositions and heads of PP even when they have lost independent semantic content and serve instead a purely grammatical function. This analysis is contrasted both with the proposal to assign them to the functional category K(ase), as favoured within current nanosyntactic work, and with an account in which they retain prepositional status but as non-projecting members of that class. In broader theoretical terms, the chapter argues that one of the benefits of LFG’s parallel architecture is the consequential economy in its postulated inventory of functional categories.

Introducing a collection of papers on suppletion looked at from a diachronic angle, this paper surveys questions that have been asked (or should be) and answers that have been considered, in this issue and elsewhere, about how, why, where, and when suppletion originates, with particular lexical items and morphological categories; what happens to suppletion once and as long as it is there; how, why, where, and when suppletion disappears again; and how suppletion fits with particular approaches to morphology and general theories of language.

This paper considers and compares the status of the concept of head within different grammatical frameworks (Minimalism, LFG and HPSG) and its relevance to our understanding of the mechanisms of change involved in grammaticalization. Our data is drawn from the developments of lexical prepositions into grammatical prepositions and complementisers in Romance and Germanic. We argue in favour of a non-derivational approach and in particular against accounts in which all developments are mediated through a chain of functional heads of the kind deployed in cartography and nanosyntax.

In addition to monomorphemic, and often monosyllabic, prepositions like French à, de, en, Gallo-Romance languages have a variety of items which have developed from original multi-word sequences. This chapter begins by examining the etymological sources and diachronic processes involved, dividing the items so formed into two distinct classes of complex prepositions (e.g. Occitan a dich de ‘by virtue of’) and compound prepositions (e.g. French avant ‘before’). It goes on to compare the different types of analysis that have been proposed for these items, concentrating in particular on the approach of nanosyntax and arguing against the syntactico-centric take on linguistic analysis that such an approach implies.

The way words can be passed from language to language is a topic that has aroused both scholarly and popular interest for centuries. In this chapter we examine two case-histories involving items that move from one language to another and then back again several centuries later. We track the etymological trails and consider the implications of such patterns for the views of both the specialist scientific community and the general public concerning the effects of linguistic borrowing at the lexical level.

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This chapter sets the scene for the whole volume and lays out the historical, geographical, and social dimensions of dialects in Italy. The main focus is on the history of the verbal system, in particular the emergence of periphrases and complex predicates, and the way these interact with each other and with the inherited members of the paradigm. There is a special focus on constructions which express causativity, progressivity, and perfectivity, and the extent to which, from a semantic perspective, they can be considered to be compositional. Exemplification is drawn from northern and southern dialects, as well as from Rhæto-Romance and Sardinian. The chapter concludes with a survey of the remaining chapters in the volume and shows how they shed light on the themes of dialectal and diachronic divergence which characterise the volume as a whole.

Italy constitutes a fertile terrain for research into language change, both because of the richness of the dialectal variation and because of the length of the period of textual attestation. Such diversity has long been the staple of research in general and Romance historical phonology, morphology, and lexis, but much less attention has been devoted to the same issues within the domain of grammar. In this book therefore, a team of leading international scholars addresses a range of topics designed to exploit and explore the interaction of the geographical and historical dimensions of morphosyntactic change. The opening chapter establishes the conceptual and empirical background. There follow a series of case studies investigating the morphosyntax of verbal and nominal constructions and the organization of the clause. Exemplification is drawn from the full range of Romance dialects spoken within the borders of modern Italy, from Sicily and Sardinia through to Piedmont and Friulia. Some of the studies narrow the focus to a particular construction within a particular dialect; others broaden out to compare different patterns of evolution within different dialects. There is also diversity in the theoretical frameworks adopted by the various contributors. Our aim is both to take stock of the current state of the field and to set out new results and new questions to help move forward the frontiers of that research. The results are of relevance not only to those who specialize in the study of Italo‐Romance, but also to other Romanists and to those whose interest lies in the understanding of the mechanisms of linguistic change, whatever their languages of specialization

In this paper we challenge the traditional view that adjectives do not subcategorise for the grammatical function OBJ. We argue instead that the more general cross-linguistic restriction is against the assignment of accusative case outside the domain of a governing verb or preposition. This may however be violated in particular languages as we show by comparing Old Swedish, in which adjectives may unusually take accusative complements as first noted by Platzack (1982a, b) and Maling (1983), with Latin, where an accusative complement of an adjective is not possible. We then explore the diachronic developments into modern Swedish and more generally the modern Germanic languages and contrast them with the changes that have taken place in the modern Romance languages. We show that there are significant differences between the two language families in the way prepositions compensate for the loss of morphological case. We also suggest an alternative to Maling's account of the history of English near.

Nine Romance languages are discussed, first in context of their common Latin origins, and then as individual studies. The final chapter is devoted to Romance-based Creole languages. This book should be of interest to students and lecturers in linguistics, language study and Romance linguistics.