Some remarks on the infinitivus indignantis. Is this label necessary?
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Pierluigi Cuzzolin
Abstract
The present paper focusses on the issue of the terminological labels used in grammatical descriptions and to what extent they are necessary. The label discussed here is the so-called infinitivus indignantis, mainly employed to express emotions like surprise, disdain, indignation. To this construction handbooks and grammars generally devote just a few lines. In this paper it will be shown that the syntactic features associated with this pattern occur with other similar constructions and are not exclusive thereof. The question is raised whether this pattern could be analyzed and subsumed under the category of mirativity. At the end of the analysis of this type of infinitive, it is claimed that infinitivus indignantis is not a necessary label.
Pierangiolo Berrettoni (1941–2018) in memoriam
Acknowledgements
This paper was presented at the XIX International Colloquium on Latin Linguistics, held in Munich (24–29 April 2017). I am very grateful to Harm Pinkster and Rosanna Sornicola for their comments on that occasion, which obliged me to refine my thoughts on this issue. I am also indebted to Gualtiero Calboli, who read the paper very carefully and gave me a couple of crucial suggestions. Needless to add, all errors or shortcomings of this paper are my own responsibility.
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© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Copular clause classification in Latin
- Quintilian, Inst. 1, 5, 40 on solecism and Apollonius Dyscolus
- Some remarks on the infinitivus indignantis. Is this label necessary?
- Vulgar Latin as an emergent concept in the Italian Renaissance (1435–1601): its ancient and medieval prehistory and its emergence and development in Renaissance linguistic thought
- On the use of facio as support verb in late and Merovingian Latin
- On Cicero’s fine-grained perception of the prosodic features in Latin
- Section on Latin teaching
- Preface to seven articles on Latin learning and instruction
- Reading Latin and the need for empirical research: A psycholinguistic approach to reading comprehension in Latin
- Latin students’ bottom-up and top-down strategies for reading Latin literature and the impact of cross-linguistic influence
- How do Dutch adolescents translate Latin into coherent Dutch? A Journey into the Unknown
- Erratum
- Erratum to: Periphrastic comparison in Latin
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Copular clause classification in Latin
- Quintilian, Inst. 1, 5, 40 on solecism and Apollonius Dyscolus
- Some remarks on the infinitivus indignantis. Is this label necessary?
- Vulgar Latin as an emergent concept in the Italian Renaissance (1435–1601): its ancient and medieval prehistory and its emergence and development in Renaissance linguistic thought
- On the use of facio as support verb in late and Merovingian Latin
- On Cicero’s fine-grained perception of the prosodic features in Latin
- Section on Latin teaching
- Preface to seven articles on Latin learning and instruction
- Reading Latin and the need for empirical research: A psycholinguistic approach to reading comprehension in Latin
- Latin students’ bottom-up and top-down strategies for reading Latin literature and the impact of cross-linguistic influence
- How do Dutch adolescents translate Latin into coherent Dutch? A Journey into the Unknown
- Erratum
- Erratum to: Periphrastic comparison in Latin
