Du latin aux langues romanes: Structure et configurationnalité

Traditionally, the principal typological difference between Latin and Romance has been taken to involve a distinction between morphology and syntax: while Latin predominantly makes recourse to synthetic structures (with concomitant so-called free word order), the morphologically poorer Romance varieties make greater use of analytic structures (with concomitant fixed word order). According to one popular view, this difference involves a move from non-configurationality to full configurationality: whereas in Latin grammatical relations are encoded by the forms of words themselves through case and agreement morphology, in Romance grammatical relations are encoded through the syntactic context of individual words organized into distinct hierarchical phrase structure configurations. Despite the merits of this configurational view, an alternative approach to the changes in word order from Latin to Romance is developed which assumes the presence of configurational structure and functional structure already in Latin. On this view, the unmistakable differences between Latin and Romance, most notably observable in the replacement of an essentially pragmatically-determined word order with an increasingly grammatically-determined word order and the concomitant emergence of functional categories, can now be explained by formal changes in the directionality parameter and the differential role of functional structure in the two varieties.