A split-DP hypothesis for Latin and Italo-Romance

The rich morphology, lack of articles, free word order, discontinuous noun phrases, and generalized null anaphora of Latin are often taken as evidence of either non-configurationality or discourse configurationality. In this approach, the main innovation in Romance languages would be the development of a syntax-configurational structure. The aim of this paper is to provide a formal analysis to show that the possible word orders in Latin are not just dependent on pragmatics but are strictly controlled by syntax. We propose that Latin is as configurational as Romance languages, claiming that they have the same hierarchy of inflectional features, of adjectival modification, and of discourse features, and display the same syntactic procedures to combine lexical and functional elements. From this perspective, the diachronic change from Latin into old and modern Romance languages (here represented by old and modern Italian) is to be derived by a single parameter that regards the different bundling of the features in D, namely Case and Reference, with the other features of N, namely Gender and Number