Il latino come corpus linguistico per uno studio teorico in chiave generativa. Risultati e prospettive.

A generative study of Latin word order allows for the assumption of a basic syntactic structure generated by the interaction of universal principles and language-specific parameters, which can be further extended by movements triggered by discourse (semantic and pragmatic) features. A corpus-based investigation supports the validity of this method, confirming the predictions spelled out in a qualitative analysis from the quantitative perspective. We give an example of this integrated qualitative-quantitative approach in the area of nominal expressions, showing that the basic orders are overwhelmingly attested, while the other orders are less frequently attested as they are “costly” in a theory-internal scale.