This chapter undertakes a critical typological review of the position of Romance in relation to other language families, highlighting the extent to which the Romance family can be considered to represent a coherent linguistic ‘type’, what typological similarities and differences it presents with respect to other branches of Indo-European, the shared features which serve to bind the group together and which, at the same time, may serve to distinguish Romance from other linguistic families, and the position of Romance within the so-called Standard Average European Sprachbund. Specific topics...

This chapter undertakes a critical typological review of the position of Romance in relation to other language families, highlighting the extent to which the Romance family can be considered to represent a coherent linguistic ‘type’, what typological similarities and differences it presents with respect to other branches of Indo-European, the shared features which serve to bind the group together and which, at the same time, may serve to distinguish Romance from other linguistic families, and the position of Romance within the so-called Standard Average European Sprachbund. Specific topics dealt with include: typologically significant category losses and innovations; determiners; auxiliaries; word order change; sentence negation; the clitic pronoun system; gender and number categories.