The Asturian language and the evolution of Romance clausal structure

Abstract

Abstract Over the past few years, the comprehensive study of syntactic variation across both the Germanic and the Romance branches of languages in relation to the unmarked word order pattern has meant a more in-depth knowledge of the nature of the verb-second phenomenon – an extremely intricate typological concept because of the complex factors that give rise to such a word order restriction. The aim of this paper is to investigate word order phenomena in the Asturian language (Romance, Western Iberian: Spain) from a comparative perspective1 by examining the word order patterns found in a number of documents written over the course of two centuries, with a view to determining what constitutes the unmarked word order and gaining a better understanding of its core syntax. Such a study has entailed collating research on the verb-first, verb-second and subject-verb-object orders. Finally, it aims to shed more light on the evolutionary development of the Romance languages.