Acceso usuarios
Estados Unidos
This study documents the definitive consolidation of the Object + Verb (OV) > Verb + Object (VO) change in the passage from Latin to Hispano-Romance. The change can be situated around the very point at which the first cases of clitic duplication of preverbal, nominal direct objects (i.e., direct objects whose nucleus is a noun) surface in the written records. A scrutiny of central-northern Iberian texts, whose composition ranges from the eighth to the twelfth century, allows me to claim that clitic duplication of the most prominent kind of nominal and preverbal direct objects, i.e., humans —as opposed to inanimates—, can be found in the eleventh century. But given that linguistic changes normally occur in speech, rather than in writing, first, our study shows that the categorical consolidation of the change in question happened even before clitic co-referentiality of direct objects emerged in the extant texts. Therefore, clitic duplication of nominal, preverbal animate accusatives points to OV having established itself in Hispano-Romance, by the eleventh century, not only as an emphatic order, but also as a derived pattern from non-emphatic VO.
