Volume 19, Issue 2

This article investigates multiple pragmatic facets of Latin greeting as depicted in the corpus of Roman comedy (Plautus, Terence). To this end, different frameworks are combined, including Conversation Analysis, Speech Act Theory, and the most prominent (Im)politeness Theories. The complexity of the greeting phenomenon is first demonstrated by identifying its position inside the opening section of the dialogue with possible reductions, elaborations, and substitutions. Thus a heterogeneous group of greeting tokens is retrieved from the comedy corpus, which, furthermore, fit the speech-act theoretical description of the greeting as a behabitative (Austin), expressive act (Searle) or acknowledgment (Bach and Harnish). Moreover, the paper briefly signalizes the contact-oriented (phatic) functions of the salutation ritual as access display (Shiffrin) or its use as a mechanism of (re)producing the social order (Schegloff). The main part of the investigation, however, is devoted to the greeting formulae and their linguistic variation in Plautus and Terence. After briefly presenting the classical model of (im)politeness (Brown and Levinson), the paper relates the speech-act formulation of the expressions to positive- or negative-politeness strategies. Finally, the article applies the frame-based analysis of the politeness’ formulaic language, as proposed by Terkourafi. The dialogue openings are classified according to their broader extralinguistic context (e.g. participants, temporal setting, the reason for the encounter) into several situational frames. In the last section of the paper, the (im)politeness value of the greeting expressions is revised in relation to their adequacy to a given situation type. In result, some instances of using the formulae inappropriately (i.e., out of frame) are given, which demonstrate the complex interpersonal dynamics of the verbal interaction depicted by Plautus and Terence.

This paper deals with the category of number in Latin, specifically with the different meanings of the plural with verbal nouns. In the first section, I establish a reference framework on the concept of number, and in particular the so-called “number anomalies”. The second part of the paper addresses the functional complexity of the category of number itself, so it presents and exemplifies the four different meanings of plural forms with verbal nouns and explains them in light of the concepts of prototype and recategorization. The third section aims to identify the factors yielding a determined plural reading; in this way, I explain the connection between some meanings of the plural and the types of events that verbal nouns describe. Lastly, in the final section, I discuss the main results of this study.

This paper provides a fully word-based, abstractive analysis of predictability in Latin verb paradigms. After reviewing previous traditional and theoretically grounded accounts of Latin verb inflection, a procedure is outlined where the uncertainty in guessing the content of paradigm cells given knowledge of one or more inflected wordforms is measured by means of the information-theoretic notions of unary and n- ary implicative entropy, respectively, in a quantitative approach that uses the type frequency of alternation patterns between wordforms as an estimate of their probability of application. Entropy computations are performed by using the Qumin toolkit on data taken from the inflected lexicon LatInfLexi. Unary entropy values are used to draw a mapping of the verbal paradigm in zones of full interpredictability, composed of cells that can be inferred from one another with no uncertainty. N- ary entropy values are used to extract categorical and near principal part sets, that allow to fill the rest of the paradigm with little or no uncertainty. Lastly, the issue of the impact of information on the derivational relatedness of lexemes on uncertainty in inflectional predictions is tackled, showing that adding a classification of verbs in derivational families allows for a relevant reduction of entropy, not only for derived verbs, but also for simple ones.

The present study gives a comprehensive portrait of the accusatival-passival type of the composite-predicate (or support-verb) construction in the history of Latin. Taking stock of properties shows them to only minimally serve as a touchstone distinguishing between Latin composite predicates and syntagmatically identical verb + direct object constructs. The intricate issue of idiomaticity and the prospects of establishing its parameters are discussed, concluding that although characteristics such as figurativity of the verb or direct-object incorporation indicate this status, the closed corpus of Latin securely allows only for a quantitative parameter, or familiarity, for this kind of a complex predicate. We are looking from the diachronic perspective at individual support verbs, primarily capere and habere , in the evolvement of their function and status—grammatical or lexical-phraseological—as well as at other sets of verbs, figurative ones and verbs otherwise departing from their basic meaning. The support verb emerges as the cardinal constituent of the construct, determining the function of the complex, and as considerably autonomous, being capable of representing, in anaphoric contexts, the entire construction. A reconsideration of the opposition between composite predicates and their monolexematic counterparts brings up again their added value as to exhaustiveness, clarity, perspective, and focus of the message conveyed through a composite predicate.

The combined analysis of epigraphic, literary and grammatical sources allows light to be shed on linguistic problems concerning the two superlatives of pius , piissimus and pientissimus , which have been mostly overlooked by scholars to date. Regarding the first superlative, Cicero says that it does not exist in Latin (CIC. Phil . 13.43.9), whereas the second form is exclusively attested in epigraphy, with no occurrences in ancient literary or scholarly texts. Moreover, the morphology of pientissimus cannot be explained according to Classical Latin rules, since the only verb which is semantically related to pius , piare , belongs to the first conjugation (it also does not fit semantically). In the present paper, we will try to demonstrate that piissimus was generally avoided in the literature of the Classical age based on linguistic purism, though it was probably used in colloquial Latin, and definitely normalized as a standard form in the Post-Classical age, as can be seen in both the literary and epigraphic instances of this word. In the case of pientissimus , this may have initially spread in the epigraphic domain, and subsequently entered so-called Vulgar Latin.