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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.

This article presents the main results of a corpus-based analysis of the metaphorical expression of emotions in Latin and a new resource specifically designed to facilitate such large-scale study of conceptual metaphors, the Lexicon Translaticium Latinum . The first part of the paper provides quantitative and qualitative evidence about the types of metaphors used by Roman writers to express four basic emotions: fear, anger, love, and hate. Our research takes a corpus-based and target-oriented approach, analyzing all occurrences of the main lexemes denoting these emotions in Latin texts dating between the third century BCE and the second century CE. The results demonstrate the highly embodied nature of the metaphors used by Latin authors to make sense of (and express linguistically) their experiences of fear, anger, love, and hate. Moreover, the differences in the usage of the metaphorical patterns across the four semantic fields, in terms of type and frequency, correlate with the different physiological reactions provoked by the four emotions we examined. In the second part of the paper, we present the Lexicon Translaticium Latinum , an open-access, digital dictionary of Latin metaphors, currently under development. It facilitates large-scale analyses of highly conventionalized metaphoric patterns that organize meanings throughout Latin, at the same time allowing the kinds of relations that subsist between different types of metaphors to be captured and encoded in machine-readable formats.

Syncope of a short vowel before a cluster sT(R) ( T : stop; R : l or r ) is attested in Latin and Sabellic: Latin fēstra (beside fenestra ), sēstertius , iuxtā , Oscan vezkeí ,  minstreis , Umbrian etuřstamu , mersto . This phenomenon raises important questions both for the historical phonology of the Italic languages and for the typological study of sT(R) -clusters. In Latin and Sabellic, syncope normally took place only in open syllables. Three competing strategies are possible in order to explain this paradox. (i) It has been argued that the cluster sT(R) was an onset, which would imply that the vowel standing before the cluster sT(R) was in an open syllable at the time of the syncope . (ii) It has been proposed that the sequence sT behaves as a single consonant. (iii) It could be assumed that the syncope did not take place in a closed syllable except if the closing consonant was s (or its allophone z ). Furthermore, a careful study of the relevant material shows that in some Latin words a vowel standing before sT(R) may have been deleted by a phonological process distinct from the syncope stricto sensu (haplology, noundinum -rule).

One problem of all existing Latin dictionaries is that the text corpus was too limited to give a comprehensive semantic picture of a lemma. In the Thesaurus linguae Latinae (TLL) the database is much more extensive: the corpus of the TLL consists of all surviving texts up to ca. 600 CE . For the time up to ca. 200 CE all evidence is taken into account, for the time after that a selection. Here, using the recently written article remitto , it is shown how an article is constructed and what the criteria of the groups are. Thus, this paper gives guidance on how to interpret a TLL article. It also compares remitto, published in 2021, with the simplex mitto , published in 1957, and with dimitto , published in 1913. It turns out that the lemma remittere has three main groups that correspond exactly to the three main groups of mittere : ‘send’, ‘throw’ and ‘let go’. The criteria of these three main groups can be described as follows: ‘command or cause a movement’ (‘send’), ‘perform a movement action’ (‘throw’) and ‘allow a movement’ (‘let go’). In remittere we accordingly find: ‘to send back’, ‘to throw back’, and ‘to let go (back)’. This last meaning is the largest and overlaps with dimittere . However, remittere can also mean ‘to relax’, which we do not see in the earlier article dimitto .

In Ennius’ Annales , as in other Roman poetry of the third, second, and to some extent first centuries BC, a word-final syllable consisting of a short vowel followed by -s can scan as light even when followed by a word beginning with a consonant. In the Annales , light scansion is the norm in the second part of the foot (thesis), but heavy scansion is found four times. I argue that attempts to emend away these instances of heavy scansion are not founded on strong arguments. Rather, the infrequency of final -s making position in thesis can be put down to the sociolinguistic situation of the time, in which deletion or weakening of final -s co-existed with its presence, with the latter being characteristic of more formal speech.