All Romance languages form segmented sentences of the type illustrated by French Paul, je le vois, literally ‘Paul, I him see’, and Je le vois, Paul, literally ‘I him see, Paul’, where Paul is at the same time object of the verb voir and theme of the sentence, referring to the preceding text or to the situation. This construction constitutes a problem for historical linguistics insofar as we do not know whether it originates in Proto-Romance or has been formed separately and independently in each of the Romance languages. According to the hypothesis presented in this paper, the segmented sentence at issue originates and can probably be accounted for in Proto-Romance.
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