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Old Romanian has the VSO parametric setting in both root and embedded clauses. The list of complementizers has undergone radical changes towards Modern Romanian, especially in the case of de. Clitics cover pronouns, auxiliaries, and short adverbs, and they are all verb-oriented and associated with the inflectional field. There are two morphological instances of negation, a free morpheme and an affix. The free negation is located between the complementizer and the inflectional field, higher than the clitic. The clause structure conforms to the cartographic hierarchy with a finer-grained articulation of the complementizer and inflectional fields. Examples of clause derivation are provided for wh-movement and DP-raising.

Old Romanian displays gerund clauses in root and adjunct configurations. Root clauses are derived by mapping a null Assertion Operator that types the clause as declarative and allows for optional V-to-T (non-productive) or V-to-Fin (productive). Modern Romanian lost the Assertion Operator together with the root gerund. Adjunct gerunds remained productive because their operators are of the wh-type related to clause internal positions. The exclusive verbal nature of the gerund makes it incompatible with argument positions (that is, it is not a clausal complement).

In Old Romanian, the conditional complementizer/operator să was reanalysed as an irrealis marker in Fin, and then dissociated from the clause typing operators and from conditional verb forms. In conditional clauses, să also selected Fin/T with indicative and subjunctive mood forms, which were preserved when it spread to the complement position. The underlying structure of the să-subjunctive complement is similar to de-indicatives and a-infinitives: truncated clauses under obligatory control and fully-fledged clauses elsewhere. Also, split Fin with de să and ca să is attested, co-occurring with the remerged Fin-să. Only the remerged Fin is productive in standard Modern Romanian.

The alternation between clitic > V and V > clitic orders in root indicative and conditional clauses has been previously attributed to the parametric setting for Wackernagel’s Law, which led to the conclusion that either the clitic location has changed around the verb (traditional historical linguistics) or that the verb moves to the highest position in the clause (V-to-C) to support the clitic (standard LHM). This chapter shows, instead, that in Old Romanian high verb movement is triggered by a null focus operator, it does not reach the highest position in the clause, and it is unrelated to the position of the clitic. Modern Romanian has lost the null focus operator and, together with it, high verb movement in the same context.

The main argument is that a-infinitive complements have the underlying structure of the Balkan subjunctive, despite the non-finite morphology of the verb. This explains why these configurations may display Nominative subjects, and freely appear in contexts with or without control on the embedded subject. As with de-indicatives, obligatory control triggers truncated infinitive clauses versus fully-fledged clauses elsewhere. While a can check Fin syncretically, constructions with split Fin (i.e. de a) also occur, signalling a transition stage for the reanalysis of a from Force to Fin. The remerging of Fin is productive in Old Romanian and is preserved in the Modern Romanian configurations where the infinitive is still present.

Old Romanian texts attest to the emergence of supine clauses that spread relatively fast from adverbial to relative adjuncts and then to complement clauses. Relatives and selected supines display de in a split Fin configuration (Fin1-de) that also attests to V-to-Fin2. While in Old and standard Modern Romanian the internal structure of the supine complement differs from its indicative, infinitive, and subjunctive counterpart (that is, it lacks TP and free morpheme negation), regional varieties show developments that mimic the internal structure of the Balkan subjunctive (i.e. remerged Fin; V-to-T; free morpheme negation). This change is also reflected by an aggressive competition with să-subjunctives in selected and non-selected contexts, in the same varieties.

This book aims to sort out the myths from the facts with regard to two issues of Old Romanian grammar: the syntax of root clauses, and the syntax of clausal complements to control and raising verbs. In these respects, the book proposes formal analyses based on principled constraints on topics such as the variation in verb–clitic word orders, the peculiarities of gerund and supine clauses, and the systematic replacement patterns in clausal complements. The formalizations take into account the results of cartographic tests and are developed in terms of the crash-merge/feature checking version of the Minimalist Program.

Old Romanian displays both true and surrogate imperatives. True imperative clauses in Old Romanian are divided according to two patterns: default imperative clauses, which involve high verb movement (V-to-Fin/C) and V > clitic linearizations, and marked imperative clauses, which display the complementizer de and clitic > V linearizations. While both versions require the spell-out of Fin (i.e. either by V-to-Fin or de in Fin), the latter but not the former derive a split Fin. In V > clitic linearizations, further variation arises in morpheme ordering between the ending for second person plural and the clitic pronoun. When the ending is to the right of the pronoun, it qualifies as a clitic that marks the allocutive versus grammatical subject–verb agreement.

In Old Romanian, de can head indicative clauses with anaphoric tense under control and raising verbs. First, we argue that de-indicatives faithfully replicate the Balkan subjunctive patterns (e.g. Bulg. da-indicative). Second, we attribute the lack of subject obviation to the variation in size of the clause rather than to the switch in the type of clause (from finite to non-finite) as seen in other Romance languages; that is, a truncated CP when obligatory control applies, but a fully-fledged CP elsewhere. As a result, no PRO/ECM derivations apply to these constructions. A fine-grained analysis of the CP field indicates that Fin is split in the presence of de, which is consistent with the analysis of de in imperative clauses (previous chapter).

The conclusions chapter highlights, first, the findings relevant to verb movement and clause structure in root clauses: discourse driven V-to-Focus in finite clauses; discourse Assertive Operator in root clauses with gerunds; the obligatory spell-out of Fin in imperative clauses. The second part provides a synthesis of the complementation structures that yields two conclusions: First, Old Romanian resorts to split Fin under typological pressure from two sides (i.e. to adapt Romance markers to Balkan patterns in obligatory control configurations). Second, the split/remerged Fin operation is recycled whenever the Fin complementizer becomes completely dissociated from the features of Force. As a side effect, a typological contrast between Balkan and Romance languages arises for contexts with obligatory control, whereby the former vary the clause size and apply DP raising, whereas the latter maintain the fully-fledged clause size but vary the infinitive/subjunctive inflection and the PRO/lexical subject occurrence.

The introduction comprises three subsections: the first one is devoted to the presentation of the corpus from the point of view of the typology, dating, and localization of texts; the second presents in a highly synthetic manner the general phonological characteristics of OR (inventory of phonemes—vowels and consonants—and the diatopic distribution of their allophones); the last subsection contains a brief outline of the morphological system of OR (the features are examined separately for the noun, adjective, pronoun, and the verb).

This chapter introduces the phenomena to be studied in detail in the monograph (verb–auxiliary inversion; pronominal enclisis; scrambling; interpolation; the low definite article; changes in the position and linearization of adjectives; hyperbaton; demonstrative specialization; emergence of the freestanding determiner cel) and the theoretical framework adopted; presents the methodology and methodological difficulties, the periodization of Romanian, and the corpus; and discusses the issue of ‘foreign’ syntactic features in the syntax of old Romanian.

This chapter presents the main characteristics of OR and the deeper structural changes in the passage to MR. Special attention is paid to phenomena such as: restructuring of the Tense−Aspect−Mood system, argument structure changes, non-finite constructions changes, several cases of grammaticalization, reduction of redundancy, tendency of stabilization of syntactic rules, reduction of syntactic variation, elimination of pleonastic structures, gradual elimination of multifunctional structures, diversification and specialization of syntactic patterns, gradual process of the supra-dialectal unification, subordinating connectors changes, word order stabilization, etc.