Where did Romance N-Raising come from? A Parallel Study of Parameter Resetting in Latin and English
Paola Crisma, Chiara Gianollo · Amsterdam studies in the theory and history of linguistic science. Series 4, Current issues in linguistic theory · 2006
In this paper we try to trace the origin of N-raising in Romance, by investigating whether it was an innovation of Latin or Romance or whether it is detectable in at least another branch of the IE family that does not manifest it nowadays, which might be a first suggestion that it was a common IE feature, subsequently lost in some languages. Thus, the aim of this comparison is to establish whether the actual innovation is the introduction of N-raising or rather its loss, and which are the mechanisms that trigger this innovation. We compare Classical Latin (CL) and Late Latin (LL) to Old English (OE), i.e. older stages of Romance and modern English, the two best-studied IE representatives of the opposite values of the N-raising parameter.