ABSTRACT
In terms of its overall syntactic organisation, Sardinian displays many features which are characteristic of the modern Romance languages as a whole, though not necessarily common to all of these languages or indeed exclusive to this language family. Sardinian is essentially a configurational language with a canonical SVO order and a tendency towards verb-second order when a non-subject occurs in sentence-initial position. At the phrasal level, it shows a dominant head-initial pattern, indeed perhaps rather more rigorously than other Romance languages; for example, within the NP, pronominal possessives are systematically postnominal and the range of adjectives which can precede the noun is severely restricted. As in other varieties of Romance, the principle deviation from the configurational pattern concerns clitic pronouns, whose grammatical function is expressed by Case morphology rather than structural or linear order (and, conversely, whose order with respect to each other and to the verb is determined by considerations which are largely independent of their grammatical function). We also find extended uses of clitic pronouns which are fairly typical of general Romance: for example, the gram-maticalised use of reflexive clitics with a broadly впвкшви function as in passive-like ‘Middle‘ constructions and in the formation of pronominal verbs, the possessive use of dative clitics and, at a more discursive level, the use of clitics in dislocated constructions to denote the grammatical function of elements whose semantic content is specified by phrases which have a more peripheral structural status.
