The volume studies the mechanisms of diachronic change in sentence structure between classical Latin and early Romance languages. For this purpose it draws on the theoretical insights of Generative Grammar. Special reference is made to two of the aspects in which this change reveals itself most clearly: the order of the major constituents in the sentence and the syntax of weak and clitic pronominal forms. These two syntactic phenomena are then used as fundamental criteria for the reconstruction of sentence structure in the various stages of linguistic evolution.

linguistic evolution.