Restructuring and the development of the Romance conditional verb forms.

In this paper, we present a generative morphosyntactic account of the development of the Romance conditional verb forms from the Latin periphrasis ‘infinitive + habere’. We reject the hypothesis of D’Hulst (2001) who claims that this development took place in three stages (biclausal --> monoclausal --> synthetic) and was the result of a process of gradually moving up temporal information from lower functional projections. Instead, we propose that the Romance conditional verb forms developed from a functional restructuring infinitive construction (cf. Wurmbrand 2001) and that this development was caused by changing properties of the auxiliary.