Abstract
This paper revisits the well-established complementary distribution between the sentential negators in Classical Latin, nē and nōn. It will be shown that in wish and result clauses these negators alternate in a seemingly free manner, which would violate the complementary distribution in its strictest sense. However, this paper argues that the negators can be clearly differentiated semantically, and that there is as such no overlap between their functions. Building on Mellet (1992. L’alternance ne/non en latin Classique. L’Information Grammaticale 55. 28–32), the alternation in wish and result clauses is discussed, and it is demonstrated that the choice of negator depends on the presence of the subjunctive mood and the presence or absence of epistemic certainty: nē is the negator which is incompatible with epistemic certainty, whereas nōn is the negator which is compatible with it.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments, and also my two supervisors, Karen De Clercq and Giuseppe Magistro, for their support, guidance and valuable comments on both my BA dissertation and earlier drafts of this paper, which is an adaptation of my dissertation.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- The complementary distribution between nē and nōn revisited: a semantic approach to wish and result clauses
- Semantic analysis and frequency effects of conceptual metaphors of emotions in Latin. From a corpus-based approach to a dictionary of Latin metaphors
- Vowel deletion before sibilant-stop clusters in Latin: issues of syllabification, lexicon and diachrony
- The lexicographical approach to remittere in the Thesaurus linguae Latinae (compared with dimittere and mittere)
- Word-final -s in Ennius’ Annales: a sociolinguistic approach
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- The complementary distribution between nē and nōn revisited: a semantic approach to wish and result clauses
- Semantic analysis and frequency effects of conceptual metaphors of emotions in Latin. From a corpus-based approach to a dictionary of Latin metaphors
- Vowel deletion before sibilant-stop clusters in Latin: issues of syllabification, lexicon and diachrony
- The lexicographical approach to remittere in the Thesaurus linguae Latinae (compared with dimittere and mittere)
- Word-final -s in Ennius’ Annales: a sociolinguistic approach