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Did you know that, of all the European language families, Romance has the largest number of native speakers worldwide? Indeed, according to the latest estimates of the Ethnologue (2024), there are more than 900 millions native speakers of Romance languages, which include the bigger languages, such as Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and French, but also smaller ones, such as Catalan and Galician, and even endangered ones, such as Occitan, Rhaeto-Romance, and Aragonese. What is interesting about this language family is that linguists have a pretty good idea about the structure of their common ancestor, to wit, Latin, which places this family in a unique position compared to any other language group in the world. In this seminar, we will examine what linguistic structures converge and diverge within the Romance languages, also in comparison to their neighbours from the Germanic realm. Concretely, in this seminar, various experts will discuss a variety of phenomena that have been considered classic topics within Romance Linguistics from a comparative perspective, such as (i) Differential Object Marking (DOM), i.e., the prepositional marking of certain types of direct ojects (e.g., veo a Miriam 'lit. I.see PREP Miriam'), (ii) the development of object clitic systems (e.g., je le vois, (yo) lo veo 'lit. I him see'), (iii) the grammaticalization of the future and conditional (e.g., je chanterai - yo cantaré - io canterò 'lit. I will.sing', (iv) the various possessive systems, among others. Basic knowledge of one (or more) Romance language and/or Latin is desirable, but not obligatory.
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