The emergence and development of SVO patterning in Latin and French

by Brigitte L. M. Bauer

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.