Latin is an interesting language in a number of aspects, not only because its word order is generally free which mainly appears to depend on emphasis/’markedness’ (although SOV seems to be the most common).

For example, it has three noun gender markers (feminine, masculine and neuter), it has seven cases with rich morphology (namely the nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, and the locative), it is a null-subject language, and it is articleless, where it is assumed by some scholars that languages with no articles do not comprise of DPs (Giusti, Iovino 2012: 1). Nevertheless, by comparing Latin to Slavic and Romance and consequently finding syntactic similarities and differences to both, Giusti and Iovino (2012) illustrate that there is evidence indicating to a DP layer in Latin despite its lack of articles. This resultingly affects nominal expressions as they can also occur in different word orders. However, in a corpus carried out by Iovino (2011) consisting of nominal expressions in the works of writers between the 3rd century BCE and the 4th century CE (such as Cicero, Tacitus and Livy, to name a few), the results illustrate that with the occurrence of demonstrative pronouns in simple (noun and demonstrative) and complex nominal expressions (noun, demonstrative and another modifying element), the demonstrative generally appears in the prenominal position in unmarked cases. In simple nominal expressions, the frequency in which demonstratives precede the noun is 79.65% (Iovino 2011: 53), and because demonstrative pronouns are classified as determiners, it suggests that , as shown in () below.