The emergence and development of SVO patterning in Latin and French
Subtitle: diachronic and psycholinguistic perspectives
By: Brigitte L.M. Bauer.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1995
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 242
Subjects: Grammar, Comparative and general -- Word order; Historical linguistics; Typology (Linguistics); Language acquisition; Latin language -- Word order; Latin language -- Grammar, Historical; French language -- Word order; French language -- Grammar, Historical
Description: This book analyzes - in terms of branching - the pervasive reorganization of Latin syntactic and morphological structures: in the development from Latin to French, a shift can be observed from the archaic, left-branching structures (which Latin inherited from Proto-Indo-European) to modern right-branching equivalents.

Brigitte L.M. Bauer presents a detailed analysis of this development based on the theoretical discussion and definition of "branching" and "head." Subsequently she relates the diachronic shift to psycholinguistic evidence, arguing that the difficulty of left-branching complex structures as reflected in their painstaking and delayed acquisition accounts for the extensive typological shift from left to right branching that took place in Latin/French and the other Indo-European languages.

The author uses data from child language acquisition studies to support her thought-provoking claim.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 219-236) and index.