In addition to its theoretical impact, the development of molecular biology has brought about the possibility of extraordinaryhistorical progress in the study of phylogenetic classification of different species and human populations (especially cf. CavalliSforza et al., 1994, among others).We argue that parametric analyses of grammatical diversity in theoretical linguistics, stemming from Chomsky (1981), can prompt analogous progress in the historical classification of language families, by showing that abstract syntactic properties are reliable indicators of phylogenetic relations. The pursuit of this approach radically questions the traditional belief in the orthogonality of grammatical typology and language genealogy, broadly supporting Nichols’ (1992) program, and ultimately contributes to establishing formal grammar as a population science and historical linguistics as animportant part of cognitive inquiry

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Current theories place very mild constraints on possible diachronic changes, something at odds with the trivial observation that actual ''language change'' represents a tiny fraction of the variation made a priori available by Universal Grammar. Much recent work in diachronic syntax has actually been guided by the aim of describing changes (e.g., parameter resetting), rather than by concerns of genuine explanation. Here I suggest a radically different viewpoint (the Inertial Theory of diachronic syntax), namely, that syntactic change not provably due to interference should not occur at all as a primitive-that is, unless forced by changes in the phonology, the semantics, or the lexicon, perhaps ultimately by interface or grammar-external pressures, in line with the minimalist enterprise in synchronic linguistics. I concentrate on a single case, the etymology of Modern French chez, showing how the proposed approach attains a high degree of explanatory adequacy.Keywords: etymology, diachronic minimalism, inertia, syntactic change, Romance construct state Formal syntax and etymology have different traditions, distinct and complementary methods, and often, regrettably, disjoint sets of practitioners; one discipline mainly aims at crosslexical and possibly crosslinguistic generalizations, the other essentially traces the history of single words in the lexicon of particular languages. However, in this article I will try to demonstrate how etymological research may benefit from the results of formal syntactic analyses and how this combination is able to enhance the explanatory power of linguistic science as a whole. In so doing, I will also aim at two theoretical goals: first, I hope to show that, despite the skepticism voiced by Lightfoot (1979 and subsequent work), historical-comparative reconstruction of syntactic patterns is in certain cases quite successful; second, I will begin to outline the foundations of a very restrictive theory of grammatical change, the Inertial Theory, trying to implement, for diachronic study, the spirit and some guidelines of Chomsky's Minimalist Program.I am especially indebted to Aafke Hulk and Ian Roberts for their insightful comments on a first draft of this article. 275

The unification of traditionally distinct and apparently unrelated objects of inquiry under common more abstract principles is one of the most welcome results of empirical science. This article proposes to draw together some insights of Longobardi (1994Longobardi ( , 1996Longobardi ( , 2001 into a unified theory of objectand kind-reference viewed as a single grammatical phenomenon, though crosslinguistically parametrized. The present account aims to improve both in accuracy and explanatory force over those outlined in the articles just cited. 1 To do so, the combined leading intuitions of such works are first spelt out, in section 6, into a deeper generalization about the form/meaning relation in nominals and later deduced from a more principled mapping theory, proposing that a syntactically specified position, traditionally labeled D, is responsible in many languages for one of human fundamental linguistic abilities, reference to individuals (Topological Mapping Theory). After the unification of the syntactic mechanisms available for reference to individuals, virtually all other distinctions simply follow precisely from that between the two varieties of such entities (kinds and objects) previewed in Carlson's (1977a) ontology, indirectly confirming its continuing heuristic power, and from widely accepted economy conditions of recent syntactic theory.

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