From Latin to Romance: case loss and preservation in pronominal systems

The evolution from Latin into Romance is marked by the loss of case in nominal declensions. In most Romance varieties, however, pronouns, specifically in the 1st/2nd person singular, keep case differentiations. In some varieties 1st/2nd singular pronouns present a three-way case split, essentially the same reconstructed for proto-Romance (De Dardel and Gaeng 1992, Zamboni 1998). We document and analyze the current situation of Romance in the first part of the article (section 1). In the second part of the article we argue that the Dative Shifted distribution of loro in modern Italian, accounted for by means of the category of weak pronoun in Cardinaletti and Starke (1999), is best construed as a survival of oblique case in the 3rd person system (section 2). This casts doubts on the weak pronoun category, as applied to Old Italian as well.