This Cambridge History is the most comprehensive survey of the history of
the Romance languages ever published in English. It engages with new and
original topics that reflect wider-ranging comparative concerns, such as
the relation between diachrony and synchrony, morphosyntactic typology,
pragmatic change, the structure of written Romance, and lexical stability.
Volume I is organized around the two key recurrent themes of persistence
(structural inheritance and continuity from Latin) and innovation
(structural change and loss in Romance). An important and novel aspect of
the volume is that it accords persistence in Romance a focus in its own
right rather than treating it simply as the background to the study of
change. In addition, it explores the patterns of innovation (including
loss) at all linguistic levels. The result is a rich structural history
which marries together data and theory to produce new perspectives on the
structural evolution of the Romance languages.