Flexión sustantival y reasignación sintáctica: el orden románico de la estructura transitiva enraizado en latín medieval (Portugal y norte peninsular)

Abstract This study focuses on the reconstructed phonetic manifestation of direct objects with nouns as nuclei in the historical development of Latin, early Medieval Latin, and Ibero-Romance. Based on their written manifestation, as well as on their morphemic patterning, the apparent phonetic reality of nouns, which was continuing to merge due to an increasing erosion of the case system in Vulgar Latin, must have contributed, to some degree, to the eventual establishment of verb-direct object ( v-do ) as the unmarked order in the various Iberian domains. When v-do established itself as the unmarked order, direct object-verb ( do-v ) was reassigned as the marked counterpart, paving the way for the duplicative direct object pronoun to surface. These claims are supported by the incidence of do-v and v-do as attested to by the extant early Medieval Latin documents from Portugal and northern Iberia, namely, Asturias and embryonic Castile (La Rioja), whose composition is attributed to the eighth century.