Morphosyntactic realignment and markedness change in Late Latin: Evidence from charter texts

Abstract

This paper discusses how the Latin accusative became the unmarked default case and how this markedness turn is related to the morphosyntactic realignment of the grammatical relations in Late Latin. In Classical Latin, the nominative was the unmarked default case, as is typical of nominative/accusative aligned languages. In Late Latin, the nominative/accusative alignment changed to a semantically-based and further to a neutralised system of the Romance languages with no case contrast at all. In this process, the accusative became the unmarked default case. The present paper will bring forward evidence in support of this by comparing the extra-syntactic uses of accusatives and nominatives with the results of a quantitative study of the extended accusative in the Latin used in Medieval charter texts. The change of the default case turns out to be subject to the same semantic constraints that determine the morphosyntactic alignment.