• Dialettologia
• Sintagma Nominale
• Sintassi

The research topic of this thesis is an investigation of some aspects of the
nominal phrase (DP) in Romance.
In particular, this work is concerned with issues related to the architecture
of the DPs, such as:
- Genitive Case distribution within the nominal phrase;
- the process of genitive Case checking;
- the prepositionless genitive configuration in Romance varieties.
My research into DP nominal Phrases has a twofold purpose: on the
one hand, it aims to add some evidence to the diachronic change in the
Late Latin Case system up to the early Romance one, by showing that the
alleged strict complementarity between the (synthetic) inflectional genitive
and the (analytic) prepositional one can be challenged by the persistence
of a prepositionless type. This is made viable through the evidence in the
early stages of some standard Romance languages and modern non-standard
varieties. The impact of this diachronic perspective is rather interesting, also
in terms of syntactic parameter resetting in the development process from
Latin to Romance.
On the other hand, the aforementioned facts regarding the prepositionless
configuration shed light on a purely syntactic issue, specifically the structural
origin position of N: the sequence patterns of D, N, A, and Gen, provided in
this investigation by newly collected data, confirm salient hypotheses about
the original position of N and its paths of movement over other categories
within the noun phrase.