Adjectives in istro-romanian. on the influence of language contact on word order

In this paper we investigate a novel set of data showing that a Romance variety (Istro-Romanian) manifests a strong preference for the prenominal placement of adjectives. We first provide a description of the position of Istro-Romanian qualifying and classifying/relational adjectives with respect to the head noun, and of the ordering of complement-taking adjectives. Taking stock of this corpus analysis and corroborating it with previous research on the word order of adjectives in old Romanian, we show that the word order patterns of adjectives found in Istro-Romanian can be explained either (i) as an (internal) archaic feature preserved from an older phase of Romanian or (ii) as an effect of the Croatian influence in a language contact setting (external feature); (iii) other features are, however, found both in old Romanian and in Croatian, yielding "convergence".