ABSTRACT
The opposed terms ‘analytic’ and ‘synthetic’ have been used in a variety of (not always mutually consistent) ways by linguists ever since their introduction by August Wilhelm von Schlegel in the early nineteenth century (see Schwegler (1990; 1994) for full discussion and documentation; for a valuable perspective from another language family and much fascinating material and argumentation, see also Steever (1993)). Within Romance linguistics the common view has been that Latin is essentially synthetic in structure while the Romance languages are characteristically analytic, and the historian’s task is to study the transformation from one to the other. Tekavčić (1980 II: 15) expresses this view in a particularly forceful fashion, claiming that the move from synthetic to analytic is ‘the deepest and most important characteristic’ of Romance morphosyntax.
