1.VERB -LOCATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS IN ROMANCE 1It is well known that standard Romance languages, following the classical Latin tradition, employ prefixes -more or less opaque -and make a restricted use of verblocative (or verb-particle) constructions, in order to express spatial information with verbs. 2 Italian, French, Spanish, Romanian, Catalan and Portuguese grammars and dictionaries register prefixed verbs, and only marginally the corresponding analytic constructions, with a verb followed by a locative, forming one lexical element. 3 Differently, analytic constructions (called in English "phrasal verbs", in German "trennbare Verben") are very common in Germanic languages. 4 However, the evolution of the Latin syntactical type SOV into the present SVO type -which was fundamental to the weakening of the case system and has led to the formation of prepositions to express syntactical relations -has affected the prefix system too, making it less transparent and less productive. 5 Thus, when we look to diatopic 6 , diachronic 7 , diaphasic and diastratic 8 varieties of Romance, we note that they frequently substitute prefixed verbs with verbs plus locative constructions. This phenomenon has been discussed mainly on Italian data, since in colloquial Italian it is largely attested and various kinds of verbs followed by locatives are employed 9 .