The nature of Genitive Case

The research topic of this thesis is an investigation of some aspects of the nominal phrase (DP) in Romance. In particular, this work is concerned with issues related to the architecture of the DPs, such as: - Genitive Case distribution within the nominal phrase; - the process of genitive Case checking; - the prepositionless genitive configuration in Romance varieties. My research into DP nominal Phrases has a twofold purpose: on the one hand, it aims to add some evidence to the diachronic change in the Late Latin Case system up to the early Romance one, by showing that the alleged strict complementarity between the (synthetic) inflectional genitive and the (analytic) prepositional one can be challenged by the persistence of a prepositionless type. This is made viable through the evidence in the early stages of some standard Romance languages and modern non-standard varieties. The impact of this diachronic perspective is rather interesting, also in terms of syntactic parameter resetting in the development process from Latin to Romance. On the other hand, the aforementioned facts regarding the prepositionless configuration shed light on a purely syntactic issue, specifically the structural origin position of N: the sequence patterns of D, N, A, and Gen, provided in this investigation by newly collected data, confirm salient hypotheses about the original position of N and its paths of movement over other categories within the noun phrase.