Volume 16, Issue 2 -

In the educational project of Quintilian, the teacher aims at not only linguistic but also moral training of young people. The progymnasmata , which in Rome were mostly taught by grammarians, were a useful course for acquiring the skills in the composition of texts and getting strong civic virtues. By completing the graded series of exercises on the various types of texts, the students learned exposition techniques, forms of expression and the most appropriate rules for laying out an argument according to type of text (fable, anecdote, narrative, encomium, ekphrasis , etc.); through reading the classics, they also furnished themselves with noteworthy cultural awareness made up of myths, historical episodes, sayings and quotations, philosophical themes and juridical formulae.

The aim of this paper is to collect and classify the occurrences of genitivus of denomination with praenomen, nomen, cognomen , in significant literary and epigraphic texts of the Latin literature and epigraphy, investigating the complex relation between syntax and semantics starting from the idea of “constructional gradience,” and thus to highlight the different behaviors of local and personal names.

The authors deal with a range of phenomena characterized by anomalies with respect to the mismatch between the surface realization of nominal phrases on the morphosyntactic level, i.e. the selection of cases, and their grammatical function. In connection with the subject function, traditional scholars generally regarded this kind of non-canonical relation between sentence structure and semantic interpretation as a categorial deviation and treated it under the cover terms grammatical versus logical subject. The eye-catching title of this paper makes allusions to rather dangerous, odd and sinister characters and topics in real life. On the one hand, therefore it should express the “irrational” use of well-established terms and categories. On the other hand, it may point at our attempt to group together and “telescope” different and mostly separate constructions such as nominativus pendens, genetivus partitivus, nominativus absolutus, dativus sympatheticus , furthermore subjectless sentences and emphatic exclamations, and to put them under a common denominator, which might be called – in terms of an oxymoron – “irregular regularity.” Our analysis focuses on Latin and Ancient Greek material. Nevertheless, data from exotic languages, such as Kannada, are also considered, and they – once more – demonstrate the diversity of typologically different patterns as well as the predominant “eurocentric” attitude in the categorization of linguistic phenomena. Additionally, we discuss some features indirectly related to our main topic, such as converse verbs, the substitution of passive forms by active lexical items belonging to the same semantic field (as a type of morphological suppletion), and the change of valency or respectively semantic roles within the framework of Case grammar. However, this article only tries to fulfill the criteria of observational and descriptive adequacy within a model of ascending degrees, whereas the level of explanation will be addressed in future work.

In this paper we review a specific use of the dico form: its use as autonymous marker. From a corpus of Latin texts (from the archaic period to the Flavian Age), we try to determine if this use is correlated to specific linguistic configurations. After reminding that the dico form could be used in the self-quotation with different values (over-enunciative and autonymous) often connected with the morphosyntactic form of the quoted speech, we study more specifically the linguistic conditions of emergence of the dico form as autonymous marker and review different criteria: contextual, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. In the last part of this paper, we propose to focus our attention on two particularly relevant phenomena: the autodiaphonic repetitions and the case particularities of the word used in autonymy with dico .

This paper reviews approaches to what is known as the septimus casus from Varro and Quintilian to the late grammarians. It emphasizes the different points of view adopted to describe the seventh case in the history of Latin grammar, and suggests that some descriptions have arisen from simple misinterpretations of earlier sources. The paper confirms that Varro may have had a concept of a seventh case. Interestingly, an unnoticed connection has been detected between the earliest approaches and those in Servius’s commentaries on Vergil, where the opinion differs greatly from those in the artes grammaticae .