Volume 21, Issue 1

In many respects Latin poetry deviates from the linguistic norms of prose; such deviations are often attributed to non-linguistic factors, with the result that the language of Latin poetry is more often studied by literary scholars than by linguists. A frequent poetic phenomenon are discontinuous adjective-noun phrases, which tend to be explained by appeal to various artistic considerations. The present contribution argues that syntactic discontinuity in poetry is not arbitrary, but is subject to linguistic constraints, which are largely the same as in prose. By scrutinising 120 non-discontinuous adjective-noun phrases in the Ciris (out of a total of 531 adjective-noun phrases), it is demonstrated that the overwhelming majority of such phrases fall into a number of specific syntactic and semantic categories, while outside these categories discontinuity appears to be the rule.

This paper analyzes subordinate clauses which have gained both syntactic and discursive independence through insubordination, the diachronic conventionalization of main clause usage. First, I introduce the notion of insubordination and discuss its application to a corpus language such as Latin from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. Second, cases of insubordination from Archaic and Classical Latin are critically evaluated on the basis of evidence from different grammars and corpus research, yielding insubordinate directives (commands and requests with ut(ei) + subjunctive), insubordinate wishes (with ut, utinam and si  + subjunctive) and assertives (with quasi  + subjunctive). Special attention is paid to the pragmatic and syntactic characteristics of these insubordinate constructions such as (i) syntactic versus pragmatic independence from the linguistic common ground, (ii) main clause syntactic complexity, and (iii) the role of discourse particles of adversativity ( at, sed ) and positive polarity ( quidem ).

We present a new corpus-based resource and methodology for the annotation of Latin lexical semantics, consisting of 2,399 annotated passages of 40 lemmas from the Latin diachronic corpus LatinISE. We also describe how the annotation was designed, analyse annotators’ styles, and present the preliminary results of a study on the lexical semantics and diachronic change of the 40 lemmas. We complement this analysis with a case study on semantic vagueness. As the availability of digital corpora of ancient languages increases, and as computational research develops new methods for large-scale analysis of diachronic lexical semantics, building lexical semantic annotation resources can shed new light on large-scale patterns in the semantic development of lexical items over time. We share recommendations for designing the annotation task that will hopefully help similar research on other less-resourced or historical languages.