The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon.

The book provides a comprehensive description and in-depth analysis of the major word order changes that took place in the clausal and the nominal domains in the transition from old to modern Romanian. The data are set in a comparative Romance perspective, with attention also paid to the impact of the Balkan Sprachbund and the influence of Old Church Slavonic. Alexandru Nicolae's analysis is based on a qualitative and quantitative examination of a large number of phenomena in a representative corpus of old Romanian texts. Some of these phenomena, such as scrambling, interpolation, discontinuous constituents, and variation in the position and linearization of DP-internal adjectival modifiers, are found across Romance, while others, such as the low position for pronominal cliticization, are relatively rare. Still others are specific to old and modern Romanian, such as the proclitic and enclitic realization of the same pronominal clitic, the low definite article, and the adjectival article construction. From an empirical perspective, the volume fills a gap in the Romance linguistics literature, as several of the phenomena it explores have been largely neglected to date. More broadly it offers a valuable contribution to research into word order typology and change, the nature and content of syntactic parameters, and the theory of grammaticalization and syntactic change.

Volume 58 of the North Holland Linguistic Series, edited by Virginia Motapanyane, provides an up-to-date overview of studies in Romanian syntax. Bringing together linguists working within the field of generative grammar, the volume's comparative approach demonstrates the relevance of Romanian data to grammatical theory. The editor's introductory chapter provides a valuable summary of developments in Romanian syntax and is the ideal preparation for the studies contained in this volume, both for Romance specialists and for those less familiar with the topic.

This volume represents the first work published in English dealing with the historical grammar of Romanian from a modern theoretical perspective. It consists of a selection of papers focusing on the historical grammar of Romanian, bringing together diverse theoretical approaches in order to address a number of key morphological and syntactic issues in the history of the morphosyntactic development of Romanian. The majority of papers in this volume deal with topics in Romanian historical syntax, drawing on modern research methods and current linguistic theory, with a clear preference for parametric syntax. The most significant areas of grammar, namely the nominal domain and the verbal domain, are well represented in this volume.