In Hebrew, European-Portuguese, Spanish, and Palestinian-Arabic both SV and VS orders are possible. In the early stages of sentence construction, however, children acquiring these languages do not use the whole array of word orders in their language. Their word order preference differs in the different languages: in the first stage, Hebrew and European-Portuguese children use both SV and VS orders with unaccusative verbs, but only SV with unergative and transitive verbs. In Spanish and Palestinian-Arabic, on the other hand, children prefer VS order with unaccusative, unergative, and transitive verbs. We propose an account according to which children at this stage cannot move the subject outside of VP yet, and the cross-linguistic difference stems from the identification of Spell-Out Domains (Fox & Pesetsky 2004a). Spanish and Palestinian-Arabic allow the verb to appear before the subject, whereas Hebrew and European-Portuguese do not allow the verb to move to I until the Spell-Out domain widens beyond VP, which takes place after subject movement to Spec,IP is acquired.

... Latin , assumed to have a predominantly SOV order , is able to function because it possesses such a case system , as ... modern Romance languages such as French , as well as Modern English , have innovated SVO order . Vennemann ... This textbook analyses changes from every area of grammar and addresses recent developments in socio-historical linguistics.

indicative". Romance languages have a primarily subject–verb–object (SVO) word order, with varying degrees of flexibility from one language to another. Romance linguistics is the scientific study of the Romance languages. Romance languages are moderately inflecting, i.e. there is a moderately complex system of affixes (primarily suffixes) that are attached to word roots to convey grammatical information such as number, gender, person, tense, etc. Verbs have much more inflection than nouns. The amount of synthesis is significantly more than English, but less than Classical Latin and much less than the oldest Indo-European languages (e.g. Ancient Greek and Sanskrit). Inflection is often fusional, with a single affix representing multiple features (as contrasted with agglutinative languages such as Turkish and Mongolian). For example, Portuguese amei "I loved" is composed of am- "love" and the fusional suffix -ei "first-person singular preterite indicative". Romance languages have a primarily subject–verb–object (SVO) word order, with varying degrees of flexibility from one language to another. Constructions are predominantly of the head-first (right-branching) type. Adjectives, genitives and relative clauses all tend to follow their head noun, although (except in Romanian) determiners usually precede. In general, nouns, adjectives and determiners inflect only according to grammatical gender (masculine or feminine) and grammatical number (singular or plural). Grammatical case is marked only on pronouns, as in English; case marking, as in English, is of the nominative–accusative type (rather than e.g. the ergative–absolutive marking of Basque or the split ergativity of Hindi). A significant exception, however, is Romanian, with three-case marking (nominative/accusative vs. genitive/dative and vocative) on nominal elements. Verbs are inflected according to a complex morphology that may mark person, number (singular or plural), tense, mood (indicative, subjunctive, imperative) and sometimes aspect or gender. Grammatical voice (active, passive, middle/reflexive) and some grammatical aspects (in particular, the perfect aspect) are expressed using periphrastic constructions, as in the Italian present perfect (passato prossimo) io ho amato/io sono stato amato "I have loved/I have been loved". Most Romance languages are null-subject languages (but modern French is not, as a result of the…

In this paper we analyse the clause structure of old Italo-Romance, which, departing from (late) Latin, is characterized by a ‘verb-second’ (V2) syntax, typical of the medieval languages. In particular, we focus on Subject and Object, showing how the syntactic distribution of these two grammatical relations is sensitive to discourse function, and interfaces with pragmatic conditions (Focus, Aboutness Topic, Referential Topic) and semantic properties (definiteness, specificity, identifiability) in the information structure. With respect to the Subject, we observe how the tension between the definiteness of the referent, on the one hand, and the ‘new’, non-presupposed information value, on the other hand, determines free variation between pre- and post-verbal position. This tension is less prominent in old Sicilian, where the ‘thematization’ of the Subject in first position is no longer restricted to Aboutness Topics, but is extended also to Referential Topics, thus anticipating the [SVO] order of Modern Italian. With respect to the Object, we document the emergence of resumptive clitics, which first appear in contexts in which the dislocated Object is a Referential Topic, and only later are they generalized to Aboutness Topics, as is the case with Modern Italian.