Revisiting diachronic change in the nominal domain from Latin to modern Romance

Abstract The intuition behind this offering is classical and familiar (cf. Schwegler 1990 ): morphological richness of nominal inflection underlies the possibility of Left Branch Extraction in Latin (traditionally called hyperbaton) while the loss of morphological richness of nominal inflection yielded the Left Branch Condition that characterizes modern Romance. Specifically, analogous to the notion “strong” and “weak T” in Chomsky 2015 , I here adopt the Nominal Strength Parameter ( Blümel 2024 ), a new instantiation of the classical Borer-Chomsky conjecture which localizes syntactic variation in properties of functional heads. It states that the functional nominalizing head n (cf. Borer 2005 ) comes in two kinds for the purposes of identification of a category label — strong and weak. These two lexical values morphologically correlate with rich (gender, number and case) noun inflection on the one hand, and poor noun inflection on the other. Crucially, the analysis unifies the mentioned syntactic properties pertaining to the distribution of determiner categories with their optionality in Latin and their obligatoriness in modern Romance (cf. e.g. Longobardi 1994 on Italian). This paper makes the novel proposal that the relevant diachronic change in the nominal domain involved a resetting of the value of n from strong to weak.