Word order in the Old Italian DP

In this article I examine the impact of a cartographic approach on research about diachronic change and investigate the internal structure of the DP in Old Italian (OI). I propose that some of its marked word orders can be interpreted as instances of a scrambling phenomenon which allows a series of DP internal elements to move in front of the head noun. I show that scrambling in the DP displays similar properties to those found in the vP and the CP layers, which suggests an analysis in terms of left peripheral movements in a way similar to the one usually assumed for the V2-like property of OI. Although I will not analyze in detail scrambling in the vP phase or V2 in this article (see Poletto (2006), (forthcoming) for a detailed discussion), I will assume that all phases are built in a parallel fashion (see Poletto (2006)) in particular with respect to the formal properties associated with the left periphery