Adam Ledgeway: Changing Patterns of Configurationality in the Passage from Latin to Romance

Drawing on his ground-breaking book, From Latin to Romance (Cambridge University Press 2012), Professor Ledgeway (Cambridge, UK) will deal, in this talk, with the grammatical changes that took place in the transition from Latin to the Romance languages. As is well known, the emerging Romance languages (both standard and non-standard varieties) underwent radical changes in crucial areas of the grammatical system involving the noun phrase, verb phrase, and sentence. The reduction of the Latin case system, the appearance of complex auxiliary verb constructions (marking tense, aspect, mood, and voice), and a shift towards greater rigidification of word order are all a visible impact of these changes. Professor Ledgeway will introduce the important notion of configurationality in order to show how all these changes can be accommodated in a new theoretical perspective.